Ginger or Mary Ann comparisons are so over. The Bailey Quarters vs. Jennifer Marlowe contest isn’t much better. C’mon, Wilma Flintstone vs. Betty Rubble is more interesting than those two. You can have your Beatles vs. Stones arguments all day long for all I care. There’s only one, real, true way for me to get judgey about your judgment:
Perez Prado vs. Esquivel!
Perez didn’t write the first tune in that medley, Guaglione. It’s a Neapolitan song with music by someone named Giuseppe Fanciulli. I’ve heard Italian names before, that one about takes the cannoli. The song has words, too, by Nicola Salerno, a name that sounds like a guy with bodies in his trunk. Anyway, it got covered by everyone from Claudio Villa to Dean Martin, but it wasn’t until Perez Prado put some mambo afterburners on it that it really took off.
So there’s contestant Numero Uno. A mambo king. But in this corner, weighing in at 97 pounds (if he has rolls of quarters in his pocket), we have Esquivel!
Cher and Madonna and Elvis think they’re so cool because they only need one name, but Esquivel! puts them all in the shade. Those other pretenders don’t have an exclamation point in their names. Case closed.
So now we’re really getting down to it. Prado’s Mambo King act, vs. Esquivel! and his Space-Age Bachelor Pad Music. Fight!
Of course truly major decisions like this one require careful assessments of the essential differences. So let’s go straight to the heart of the matter. You’re going to have to choose between Prado’s pencil-thin moustache and Esquivel!’s gamma-ray-resistant eyeglasses.
Perez has made this decision even tougher by occasionally sporting both the pencil-thin moustaches and uber-cool sunglasses.
I know, tough choice, huh? Esquivel! was a visionary, of course, and not just for music. He correctly surmised that his taste in eyewear would become so universally accepted as cool that even plagiarizing presidents of Ivy League colleges would be wearing them eventually. So he tried to steal a march on history, and perhaps on Perez, by upping the ante and barging into the seventies with a wispy Van Dyke beard, suitable for a modestly dangerous villain on the old Star Trek.
Ah, the Engelbert Humperdinck “polyester lasagna” shirt, the Vitalis hair, the bow tie suitable for manned flight, the doughy Abba-looking chicks. Esquivel! truly had it going on.
You’re going to have to decide if Mucha Muchacha or Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White (the latter half of the first video) is the happiest song ever recorded. This may be impossible, because they basically both are in some sort of Heisenberg dead cat/live cat in the box situation. They both can’t be Numero Uno, but they are. Maybe you’ll just have to decide if you like The Big Lebowski or Office Space better than the other. But that invites a temptation to settle the challenge by dragging in Henry Mancini from Jackie Treehorn’s house, and “third man in” is considered bad taste in street fights like this one.
The first person that says, “Neither. Xavier Cugat,” I’m coming looking for you. And not with binoculars, either.
Both Jean and Bob Moffett mentioned Patsy Cline in the comments after an earlier post about George Jones. I found this video of Patsy performing Lovesick Blues on Community Jamboree in 1960, with a charming Ferlin Husky introduction.
I made the same mistake most everyone must make when they hear that tune sung by anybody. You figure it’s a Hank Williams song. Well, it ain’t.
It was written by Tin Pan Alley composers named Cliff Friend and Irving Mills, way back in 1922. It was recorded a bunch of times after that, including by a minstrel show singer named Emmet Miller and a country singer named Rex Griffin. Hank must have heard on the radio and liked it, and he performed it on the Louisiana Hayride radio show in 1948. The audience loved it, so Hank recorded it in 1949, and it spent 16 weeks at Number One on the Billboard Top Country and Western singles chart. People forget the minstrel show versions of things right quick when you have a smash like that.
The name Cliff Friend probably doesn’t ring a bell for you, but maybe it should. He’s one of those anonymous guys whose name you used to see going round and round on the label in small print on the center of a 45 record. But Cliff never really got much public acknowledgement for his most popular tune, one that makes Lovesick Blues pale in comparison. He co-wrote The Merry-Go-Round-Broke Down.
What the hell is The Merry-Go-Round-Broke Down? You can be forgiven for asking, but trust me, you know it:
Maybe you prefer the later versions:
By the way, to go even further down this rathole, the wild lap steel Hye-Wye-En glissando that opens up the later versions of the Looney Tunes song was played by Freddie Tavares. Besides being a crack lap steel player, he was a lead designer of the Fender Stratocaster guitar. You can see him at work alongside Leo Fender in 1959 in an earlier blogpost, Minor Seventh Heaven.
Meanwhile, back on planet Earth, let’s get back to Patsy Cline singing Lovesick Blues on teevee. It’s fantastic.
People often think they’d like to be singers or other forms of famous musicians. If you’ve never had a curtain rise in front of you and been confronted by 2,000 eyeballs, or 1,999 if Peter Falk is in the audience, you might not understand how unnerving it might be. To take it up a notch, Patsy has to stare into the cold, dead eye of the TV camera, and somehow connect with anonymous people in a virtual audience as if they’re in front of her. She makes it look easy. It ain’t, or we’d all be doing it.
I was going to commend Jean and Robert for their enthusiasm for Patsy, but I’m not sure exactly why. I’ve literally never met any human being who doesn’t think Patsy Cline is excellent. Stoner, greaser, big band devotee, punker, jazz aficionado, blues singer in a porkpie hat, hip hop breakdancer, it doesn’t matter. Everyone loves Patsy Cline.
So I guess I can only thank Jean and Robert for reminding me to post a video of her. It’s the least I can do, and I always do the least I can do.
Well, I’m informed that they did call George Jones the Rolls-Royce of Country Music, but I’m not sure it fits. A Rolls is posh. A Rolls isn’t for driving, it’s for being driven in. And a Rolls is British, and that’s way out of bounds for George. I understand the sentiment. Pretty much every country singer wanted to sing like George Jones. Calling him a Cadillac might seem like faint praise.
More to the point, George was a serious wildman. He stands stock-still, his lantern jaw moving in Clutch Cargo fashion, his hair laid out with a spirit level, so you might be forgiven for thinking that man in the Nudie suit must be a taciturn sort of fellow. But he was anything but. He was an ex-Marine, a famed hellraiser, a skirt chaser, and occasionally had to be put in a straitjacket and carted off to the hospital to dry out. He, ahem, liked to drink a bit. A bit of a still at a time.
No, his voice was clear and powerful, butter and a headbutt at the same time, so he’s no Rolls-Royce. We can do better than that, nickname-wise. Once, his wife tried to keep him from going out and getting drunk, and she hid all the car keys, and went to bed. When she woke up, George was missing. She drove eight miles on the highway to the next town, to the closest place he could conceivably get drunk at, and found George sitting at the bar. Their riding mower was parked out front.
The John Deere of Country Music. There, I fixed it.
El Ladron is Spanish for The Thief. I could translate the lyrics for you at length, and explain why Sonia seems so glad to see one in her dreams, but it’s easier to just show you how it works:
Remember Tom Brady’s rules for approaching women, kids:
No, really. The idea that generational shifts happen in neat, tectonic fashion, bang-on the first day of each decade, is useless for encapsulating eras. So I’m gonna fix it. Well, at least the years between 1952 and 1982. Those thirty years were split into two parts, not three: The Fixties, and The Endless Bummer. The thing everyone calls The Sixties never happened.
The hinge point was 1966, or thereabouts. The no-mans land that opened up between the two eras was brought into stark relief in about 1965, when you could go to the cinema and see the last gasp of the Fixties, The Sound of Music, an honest to god musical, then go back in the evening and see the dawning of the Endless Bummer in Help!, an entertaining but disjointed and irreverent slapdash affair. When you went home to your split-level ranch in the suburbs, mom and dad put Sinatra’s It Was a Very Good Year on the living room credenza record player.
But now the days are short, I’m in the autumn of my years
Indeed. Meanwhile, the kids went down in the basement rumpus room and used the portable hi-fi to play the Rolling Stones doing Satisfaction.
When I’m driving in my car And a man talks on the radio He’s telling me more and more About some useless information Supposed to fire my imagination
It was a baton pass, and the baton wasn’t just dropped, it was thrown into the shrubs. We went from everything’s Technicolor to everything sucks, and barely noticed the change. All of a sudden it’s the Endless Bummer, one that lasted until about 1982.
I wasn’t alive or anything interesting like that, but I have a library card and relatives: The Fixties were the greatest time in the history of the United States, so probably the greatest time in the history of the world. You can fight me on this if you’d like, but I’ll be showing up to the debate in a giant two-tone convertible with more horsepower than a B-25, spangled with enough chrome to reflect Telstar signals back into space, with Technicolor Marilyn Monroe on the bench seat next to me, and a trunk full of penicillin. That beats everything that came before, easily, and everything after, even if you do favor FM radio over AM.
The real Fifties didn’t start in 1950 anyway. Truman was still president in 1950, and I can’t think of a less Fifties-ish person than Harry. He was pure Roosevelt hangover. He looked and acted more like Woodrow Wilson’s haberdasher than a modern person. He stumbled into the Korean War because he missed World War II. It was all he knew. Harry had olive drab hemoglobin.
Harry was so brain-dead that he offered to run as Eisenhower’s vice-president after the big war. It’s a testament to Ike’s probity that Harry had no idea he was a Republican, or even a normal human being. Ike was an American first, a concept that a machine politician like Truman couldn’t understand, never mind get behind. It suited the coming Fixties. It’s useful to remember that the political yings and yangs of Joseph McCarthy and JFK were both considered staunch anti-communists.
And JFK had nothing to do with the traditional take on the 1960s. Flower power would have no appeal for a lace-curtain Bostonian Irishman like him. Ike was an old general, but presided over a young, civilian boomtime. JFK was the hood ornament on Ike’s era. It hit a big pothole in Dealey Plaza, but the vibe allowed it to coast for a few years before Johnson was able to drive the car all the way into the fiscal, moral, and military ditch. Then it rolled downhill pretty fast, and right into the lake where Jimmy Carter was trying to beat a bunny to death with a paddle. So The Endless Bummer started out with the Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, and ended up with another sort of Kool-Aid test in Guyana. They cheaped out and used Flavor Aid, of course, but they didn’t skimp on the cyanide.
Now, the Fixties are often maligned as a cultural wasteland, mostly by people with rings in their intellectual noses. Well, the Fixties gave us Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, and the atypical Dave Brubeck’s Take Five in the same year. Wes Montgomery was inventing smooth jazz right in front of your eyes. There was the birth of bossa nova. Broadway theaters were heaving with musicals. And they didn’t call it the Golden Age of movies for nothing. The industry had to compete with the television all of a sudden, and managed it just fine by giving much more to look at. There was something for everybody, too. From ’52 on, you could sit with your feet stuck to the floor and your eyes glued to the screen in a big, gaudy movie house and see The Quiet Man, Shane, Roman Holiday, The Big Country, and watch the most exciting twenty minutes in movies, ever — the chariot race in Ben-Hur.
They made thoughtful movies about regular people back then. I mean regular regular people. How about Ernest Borgnine as Marty? David Lean reeled off the greatest string of movies ever: The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, and Doctor Zhivago. You could even take a girl to that last one, and she’d like it. Frank Lloyd Wright was building Usonian houses while Royal Barry Wills held down the trad suburban fort with his elegant colonials and Capes in New England while Googie style spangled the west coast and Midcentury Modern filled in everywhere else. Women wore Dior and pencil dresses and pillbox hats.
In the late sixties, the studio system fell apart, and the Hollywood New Wave took over. For a while, Warner Brothers was owned by a casket manufacturer that had a sideline of parking lots. That had predictable results on the output. Eventually auteurs got the upper hand, and they made a bunch of popular movies that made big money. But do you notice anything about this list of the top ten American New Wave classics?
Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
The Graduate (1967)
Easy Rider (1969)
Midnight Cowboy (1969)
Five Easy Pieces (1970)
The Last Picture Show (1971)
Taxi Driver (1976)
Chinatown (1974)
Nashville (1975)
Apocalypse Now (1979)
Yep. Great cinema. But. Uniformly bleak, ambiguous, cynical, mostly violent and nasty. It’s what happens when nihilism takes over from the sunny optimism of the Fixties. You get the Endless Bummer. Throw in The Godfather, and you’ve got the entire zeitgeist encapsulated: Why bother trying? Everything is crooked.
Let’s take a look at a tale of two cities, as it were: Anne Bancroft.
Anne seems pleasant enough, so I won’t be ragging on her personally, just using her to point out how the worm turned just from 1962 to 1967. First, she won an Oscar for The Miracle Worker. She played Anne Sullivan, who through dint of perseverance and affection teaches a deaf, dumb, and blind Helen Keller to interact with the world. It’s typical of movies from the Before Times. It’s based on real, important things, tough sledding emotionally, perhaps, but uplifting and inspirational in its final effect.
Then 1967 rolls around and Anne is Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate. Whoah, there’s a tectonic shift. No one is going to help a disabled girl in that one. Benjamin Braddock is maybe the Ur-self-absorbed college grad. Dustin Hoffman played the shrimp that launched a thousand Lloyd Doblers, guys who don’t know what they’re for, only that they’re against everything on offer. Middle-aged Anne slept with her neighbor’s kid, and then turned into a bunny boiler when he started dating her daughter. It was supposed to be an evisceration of suburban life, but it’s closer to what people who rub elbows with Woody Allen think the suburbs is like. The heavy fog of disillusionment, generational enmity, unexplained ennui, and a full Peter Pan outlook on life was the Long March Through the Endless Bummer in a nutshell. The movie is funny in its satirical way, but for the life of me I’ve never understood the idea that it’s romantic. I guess I have to quote myself here:
Now, many people think Romeo and Juliet is a love story, instead of a cautionary tale about teen infatuation that ends up with everyone dead. These same people also think The Graduate is a sweet love story, and that it has a happy ending. Not hardly, if you’re paying attention. Here’s the final scene of the movie: Link to video. In the back of the bus, it finally dawns on Benjamin Braddock that he has no idea why he was trying to woo fair maid. It was forbidden, so he wanted it. He’s already ambivalent about her. She looks at him and maybe wonders what she saw in him in the first place.
“It was forbidden so he wanted it.” If there’s a better encapsulation of the imbecile impetus behind the Endless Bummer, and the death of the Fixties, I haven’t seen it. And I had to write it myself.
No, I’m not talking about Bernard Purdie, shown here playing the drums with Vulfpeck, although it would be alright with him if I was. Bernard played on the original Kid Charlemagne, a Steely Dan minor masterpiece. I like how Bernard is wearing a Bernard Purdie tee-shirt. I think I’ll wear a Sippican Cottage t-shirt when I pick up my Nobel prize for literature. Or maybe a sweatshirt. I hear it gets cold in Stockholm. On further reflection, maybe they can just mail me the money and the bronze coaster with the dynamiter on it, and save me the trip.
Speaking of trips, in the title, I’m not referring to Bernard, or Becker or Fagen, or even Owlsley, the LSD king that Kid Charlemagne is written about. All that chemistry was in aid of the largest deliberate experiment in subverting the culture ever attempted: The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test. Ken Kesey has had a larger influence on the United States than anyone going back to maybe Alexander Hamilton. And while it ultimately led by a very circuitous route to the wonderful agglomeration of Bernard Purdie and Vulfpeck playing Kid Charlemagne, it would be hard to come to any conclusion but one: That influence was all bad.
The Merry Pranksters, as they styled themselves, wouldn’t mind being called bad influences by the L7s, because they were rebelling against the squares. Many people thought the Pranksters were doing a good thing by telling people that drugs would expand their minds, and that these expanded minds would lead to all sorts of wonderful things, like whirled peas, face painting, and luxuriant armpit hair on women.
Well, it didn’t.
All those Day-Glo freaks who used to paint their face They’ve joined the human race Some things will never change
These are the Day-Glo freaks Becker and Fagen were talking about, and Kid Charlemagne was supplying with LSD:
Kesey is largely responsible for the two major problems currently haunting America. First, he wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. That made him a pile of money, and earned him plenty of notoriety. It was the lever that started the big rock of “reform” rolling downhill for US mental hospitals. Of course Chesterton’s Fence wasn’t consulted, and the benighted denizens were simply turned out of doors instead of firing all the prototypical passive aggressive girlbosses like nurse Ratched and starting over. So mentally ill people get to live under bridges and yell at cars, courtesy of Ken Kesey.
Then Kesey started the sixties counterculture, nearly singlehanded, if Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is to be believed. Now that Wolfe is dead, I figured it was safe to read something written by him. My wife found a dogeared paperback copy of it for me in a used bookstore. If I’m still reading the frontispiece correctly, this paperback edition was printed in 1989, but was already the 31st edition of the thing. I’m always amazed at how well bad writing used to pay.
I’m exaggerating some. The book’s not bad, exactly. But the breathless praise for TEKAAT book seems a bit much to me. The author was trying way too hard, and ends up sounding like a stoned, short-bus James Joyce. But that was the spirit of the times. To a normal person, a species which of course has currently been hunted to extinction, hearing the drivel that comes out of their mouths, and the bad rock music, you realize that it only sounds like something if you’re stoned.
But that was the other Kesey shoe that dropped. Giving people LSD, including giving it to them unawares, is just one act in his passion play. The whole idea that it is completely normal for everyone to be stoned on one thing or another, or everything all at once for that matter, was adumbrated by Kesey and his coterie of Day-Glo freaks. I found it interesting that in the book, Wolfe describes what the merry band used when LSD was hard to get. They’d smoke a lot of weed and take a lot of speed, and reported that it gave them almost the same sort of trip. I immediately thought of today’s kids, gobbling ritalin and other ADHD drugs, which are a kind of speed, and smoking now-legal marijuana. Everything old is new again, I guess.
Downstream of all that, Kesey’s idea that any productive behavior is strictly for the squares now reigns triumphant. Riding around, stoned out of your gourd, and annoying the locals while filming it, just like the Merry Pranksters, is the number one career choice for young people these days, at least according to various polls:
86% of young Americans say they’d try being an influencer; 12% already identify as one, according to a Morning Consult poll (ages 13–38)
57% of Gen Z teens (13–26) believe they can easily make a career as an influencer, with the same share saying they’d leave their current job to pursue it
40% of teenagers (13–18) are actively considering becoming social media influencers, per a Citizens Financial/Junior Achievement survey
16% of teens explicitly want to become a “social media influencer/content creator,” ranking just behind entrepreneurship in a Junior Achievement/EY study
It doesn’t matter that there are no more squares to outrage. Grandma’s got an ass-antler tattoo and grandpa is swinging at The Villages hot tub with his current girlfriend. Whatever. Today’s young girls make endless videos of themselves stuffing comped food in their faces at various vacation spots, or take off their tube tops on OnlyFans to make a few bucks. The guys record their video games and publish them on Twitch or suchlike, and mention that they might also acquiesce to being a pro athlete, but pretty much no one wants a real job. Kesey did that.
So Wolfe’s book accidentally shows what happens the day after tomorrow when you take Timothy Leary’s advice to: Turn on, tune in, and drop out. Plenty of those Merry people ended up in mental, and other sorts of hospitals. An assortment ended up dead. Jail was pretty common. Eventually the hippie chicks learned that Merry Pranksters thought Hell’s Angels were just as merry, and invited them over for what sounds to me like a gang rape that Tom Wolfe should have called that. And the whole lovely worldview soldiered on through the decades until it reached its apotheosis in Fentanyldelphia, Pennsylvania:
It’s useful to recall that the original idea for giving Americans LSD was part of a CIA mind-control experiment called MKUltra. I guess you could call it a failed experiment, but then again, you’d have to know what they were really trying to accomplish to know if it was a failure, and almost every record of it was burned by the CIA. But a list of the known and likely participants in the “experiments,” some unwitting, sure is interesting. Ken Kesey, Alan Ginsberg, the Grateful Dead’s lyricist, James Whitey Bulger, Ted Kaczynski, Sirhan Sirhan, and Charles Manson. Nice bunch of people there. Very tuned in, turned on, and dropped out. Jim Jones had his own Kool-Aid test down in Guyana, too, and while no one can positively say the CIA was in on it, it sure sounds fishy, and one is reminded that denying they’re in on it is right on their business cards.
So what did it all add up to, really? Driving around in a garishly decorated bus, dressing in clown motley, taking drugs, and annoying regular people while filming it? Let’s go back to Steely Dan for the answer.
While the poor people sleeping with the shade on the light.
You have to understand, right up front, that I’ve always hated this song.
You’ll have to imagine the various unpleasant bodily excretions I substituted for blood, sweat, and tears when I mentioned the name of the originators of Spinning Wheel. It’s a fat slice of 1968 flower power horsehockey in the lyric department. That was stapled onto jazz/rock/fusion sturm and drang that always gave me the hives.
It was plenty popular when it came out, but Henry Mancini kept Spinning Wheel out of the Number One slot on the charts for a while by the supposedly romantic but mostly depressing Love Theme from Romeo and Juliet. Considering the subject, it wasn’t depressing enough to convince people that Romeo and Juliet isn’t a romance, it’s a tragedy, but Henry tried. That was followed by another musical obstruction, the red-hot knitting needle for earwax removal and instant channel changing In the Year 2525 by Zager and Evans. So Spinning Wheel never made it to the top, but it hung around on the musical Hillary Step for a good long while.
[Editor’s Note: Originally from 2017. Republished with comments intact. Also, there is no editor]
When I was a kid, we lived in a neighborhood.
Well, I thought it was a neighborhood. That term has fallen out of favor with the nattering nabobs of negativity. They heap scorn on developments now. They reserve the word neighborhood for where they live. Their neighborhoods are defined by constantly shifting imaginary lines in a featureless desert of concrete spangled with chewing gum and crime. It was a lot simpler for us back in the day. If you weren’t in the woods, you were in the neighborhood.
I had deer under my window from time to time, instead of a dumpster morning, noon, and night, but the world has spoken. They aver that I was raised in a exurban hellscape, a cultureless wasteland, and I’d identify myself as a troglodyte to say otherwise.
Who would want to live in Smalltown Sprawltown USA? Well, a lot of people did. My parents sure did. They didn’t know any better. They thought they lived in a neighborhood. They made the mistake of getting along with their neighbors, and they called it a neighborhood, and they thought that made it a neighborhood.
It seemed like the whole wide world to me, that little warren of splits and capes. In a way, it was. At first, there were only a couple dozen houses. After a while, they punched through the curb cuts and added several more neighborhoods, er, developments. It got so a kid couldn’t play street hockey without having to drag the net to the curb every ten minutes to let a car pass.
It was a polyglot place, no matter what you’ve heard from people who live in concrete dovecotes and write for the Gnew Yourk Toimes. In our neighborhood, Irishmen lived right next door to Englishmen. One side skipped car bombing his neighbors. His counterpart eschewed channeling the Earl of Essex. There was a French family right next door, too. I can still picture their little doe-eyed girl named Suzanne, forever frozen in my mind’s amber, immortal and fey and unchanging. Unlike on the continent, they required only a privet hedge instead of a foggy channel to keep from falling on each other with misericordes and getting busy.
There were Germans living next to Poles. The crabgrass invaded the neighbor’s yard looking for lebensraum, but that was about it. There were Scots living next to people I thought were sorta German, but were really Swiss, I think. If they didn’t care enough to explain to me what they were, why should I bother to figure it out?
The whole town was lousy with Italians. Italian is a funny word to a real Italian. A lot of Eyetalians got unshod of the Italian boot with firsthand memories of the Risorgimento. It wasn’t smart to assume they were all the same. A Calabrian had no use for an Abrusseze. A Venetian had no use for a Neapolitan. No one had any use for Sicilians, and still don’t.
A block away from me, a Lebanese dad pulled his Ford into his carport, waved to a French-Canadian family on one side, a Portuguese guy on the other, and a neighbor with a name out of Charles Dickens across the street. The Lebanese family had a girl that broke several thousand hearts, no doubt, besides mine, without uttering a sound. She had eyes like dishes of used motor oil, skin like two days at the beach, and a head of hair like a mink.
My school was topped off with Armenians, with a couple of Jewish kids thrown in. They seemed about as exotic as a pothole. Though we lived in New England, we had truck with real live rednecks, too. I remember Calvin, fresh from below the Waffle House/IHOP line, slouching in class and drawling like a goober. I’ll say he sounded like a goober now. No one said he sounded like a goober back then, at least out loud, because Calvin was six-two in eighth grade, and he shaved.
There were black families. In high school, my ignant bogtrotter friend from across the street went out with an Ashanti princess from the newer development a mile away. She pulled her afro into a pony tail that formed a perfect sphere that followed her like a satellite, wore tube tops, and pretended to like his Bachmann-Turner Overdrive records. He pretended to like her Earth Wind and Fire records while actually liking her tube top. The only person to disapprove of the whole affair was her father. He was moderately well-to-do by our standards, because he ate in restaurants and had a brand new car. The one-toilet Irish kid was one step from feral. Dad looked the other way a little, and wondered if maybe his daughters would mind if they moved away. Like, to Venus.
When I got a little older, I slept on a Syrian lady’s couch when I was stuck in a snowstorm. She was immensely old, forty at least, wore too much jewelry and makeup, smoked like a film noir plot, and was missing a portion of one middle finger. I don’t remember what the couch looked like.
Anyway, for a couple of decades, I’ve watched a continent full of fools and knaves trying to ram themselves into a political, social, and monetary union while they royally screwed the pooch nine ways from Sunday in the attempt. I suppose it would be unkind of me to point out that we managed it, all on our own, completely by accident, back before disco, simply because there was no corrupt, contemptible government trying to make us do it.
I have an older brother. He was a musician before I was a person, I think. He can play all kinds of things on all kinds of things. He could play the Stones or Segovia and everything in between, or so it seemed to me. I could never keep up with him. I wanted to, but the calendar always made him disappear. When I finally went to school, he disappeared into high school. When I got to junior high, he was long gone to college. He left a bass behind, and an ancient amplifier that said HOT COTTAGE in M*A*S*H letters on the back. I tried to play it without knowing how. Musical prodigies can do that. I’m not one of those.
I had a piano bench in my room. We had no piano, just the bench. Most everyone used to have a piano in their house, but that was ancient history to me. My mother could play one. My brother can play one. My older son once stunned me by playing The Turkish March by Mozart at breakneck speed, even though he’d never had a piano lesson. He did have a crummy plastic keyboard in his room, though, and kids get up to things. My younger son can play piano music on the computer keyboard, because of course he can. But when I was a kid all I had was the bench in my room in the basement, living my little horizontal life between the sleepers and the drop ceiling and the pegboard walls. The piano bench seat was a lid. When I lifted it up, it was filled with sheet music. Walk On By was in there.
Musical notation is scary when you first see it. It’s runes on a stele. Cuneiform. Later you learn it’s just another language, like Spanish or COBOL or Pig Latin. It’s a bland set of instructions. Burt Bacharach and Hal David wrote the instructions to perform Walk on By in 1963. Dionne Warwick, 24 years old in that video, recorded in the ’27 Club’ in Knokke, Belgium, on New Year’s Eve in 1964, got the same instructions as everybody else, I guess.
Sheet music is usually piano music, with lyrics under the bars. There are two staffs, one for each hand. The treble is the G clef on the top, and the F clef is the left hand (bass) on the bottom. After a while, the publishers started putting the chord shapes for guitar accompaniment over the piano music, because Beatles.
So all alone in that drop ceiling dungeon, I dutifully worked out the damn dots on the bass line, and tried to play Walk On By, even though it was a decade or more since it had stopped showing up on the radio, humming the tune in my head for company. Because, like Everest, it was there.
I realized right then that those notations on the page are always missing something important. Dionne Warwick, for instance. Without her, the same damn dots end up like this:
I was treated to The Heartbreak Kid (1972) last night. “Treated” may be the wrong word here. I’ve lost my thesaurus, so I’ll have to wing it. Subjected to? Mistakenly viewed? Doggedly watched all the way through? Suffered from a full-blown bout of Elaine May?
Well, I guess it’s not that important to characterize the experience in depth. I’ll bet the signs posted outside a leper colony have far fewer words on them than the warning label on Wegovy. If you’re doing a lot of explaining about danger, people will ignore what they hear. Post a sign that simply says: Leper Colony, and people stay out. I wish I’d read the sign that said: Elaine May Is the Director outside the leper colony of entertainment that The Heartbreak Kid encloses. I would have heeded it. A picture of Charles Grodin would have done the trick too. A hard pass on him never disappoints.
I was cozened into watching the thing because Neil Simon wrote it. I like Neil Simon less than I like Neil Hefti, but he’s alright. His hyper-Levantine microscope doesn’t resonate with me, but it holds no terrors, either. The Odd Couple has lots of good jokes in it. I thought there might be at least one in The Heartbreak Kid. I thought wrong.
I admit I’m defective. I can no longer enjoy entertainment simply on its own merits. I get to wondering about things outside the frame. Since it’s not possible for anyone who hasn’t been thrown clear of an automobile recently to enjoy The Heartbreak Kid, I started thinking outside the frame almost immediately. I could be certain that Elaine May wasn’t going to amuse me, so I knew I had to amuse myself. My mind wandered, and I wondered through the whole shebang whether I was supposed to like the main character, or dislike him, or laugh at what anyone said, or be outraged, or any other normal human emotion that it failed to engender. That goes for any of the other characters, or anything they said, or did, or wore, or drove, or ate, or talked about. There simply was no there, there for me to hang my hat, or my head on. But that’s Elaine May’s career in a nutshell.
Nichols and May are from before my time, but I have a library card. They were famous for stretching 15 seconds of material over 15 minutes of occasional nervous laughter from what I gather was some kind of prison audience. They say people always clap. Some because they like it. Some because it’s over. I know which way to bet on anything from Nichols and May.
Nichols and May are often exalted as comic’s comics.
Woody Allen declared, “the two of them came along and elevated comedy to a brand-new level”.
They did indeed elevate comedy to a brand new level, a subterranean one, which is no mean feat. Before them, comedians never realized you could be a comedian without ever saying anything funny, or even interesting, and still get paid. Woody took a page out their playbook, but chickened out and sprinkled his movies with Borscht Belt jokes between the scenes of people behaving badly towards one another in rent-controlled apartments. This rendered the tedious behaviors of the revolting characters watchable.
If you look up The Heartbreak Kid, they refer to it as a “black comedy.” This term has been twisted from its original meaning to cover stuff that’s painfully unfunny, instead of stuff that’s darkly amusing. The Coen Brothers do black comedy. Elaine May farts, sticks out her hand, and says, TaDa!. When no one laughs, she says she meant to do that. You know, black comedy!
I have no notions that the entertainment world is a meritocracy. People willing to get Weinsteined know how to climb the greasy pole, so wondering how talentless people thrive in it is a fool’s errand. But analysis visits you unwonted sometimes. I started to analyze The Heartbreak Kid, and where it came from.
A cursory glance at Elaine May’s filmography reveals that the high point was writing and directing Ishtar. Now there’s a clue. Ishtar is Hollywood shorthand for a thoroughgoing, money-desolating Armageddon-level flop.
Ishtar was nominated for three Golden Raspberry Awards, including Worst Picture and Worst Screenplay, with May winning Worst Director, tied with Norman Mailer for Tough Guys Don’t Dance. Ishtar also was nominated for Worst Picture at the 1987 Stinkers Bad Movie Awards. When the Stinkers unveiled their “100 Years, 100 Stinkers” list to present the 100 worst movies of the 20th century, Ishtar made the list and ranked at No. 20 in the listed bottom 20.
So Nichols and May had parted brass rags by 1961. Nichols went on to become one of only 21 persons to achieve an EGOT (An Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony Award). Elaine May… didn’t. Nichols was the most successful stage director anywhere for a good long while, and then became a wildly successful movie director. His films were nominated for 43 Academy awards, and won 7 of one kind or another. And the most successful of all of them was The Graduate. It cost $3 million to make, and earned $105 million at the box office. That’s $857 million in 2024 bucks.
So I started to do a compare and contrast between The Heartbreak Kid and The Graduate, and for good reason. The Heartbreak Kid is a wan attempt to accomplish the same story, one done by someone who really knew what they were doing, by someone who never did. The Heartbreak Kid is so badly done that no one noticed the similarity, but it’s there.
In The Heartbreak Kid, the protagonist (Lenny) is a creepy nebbish played by Charles Grodin. He literally has no redeeming qualities, and is uninteresting in every way. He decides to dump his wife on his honeymoon because WASPy Cybill Shepherd winks at him. In The Graduate, the protagonist (Dustin Hoffman as Benjamin Braddock) is a uninteresting loafer with no redeeming qualities. He wants to marry a girl way out of his league after sleeping with her mother. Both characters turn their lives (and everyone else’s) upside down to convince their respective inamoratas to marry them. These women are supposed to be attracted to them for reasons that would escape any normal person’s thinker-upper.
Lenny goes through his banal machinations to marry his manic pixie-shiksa dreamgirl, and ends up at his wedding reception reciting the same humdrum bromides about life he used to win fair maid to everyone there, ending up on the couch with two children listening to him. He’s already bored with the whole idea. That’s the point, I guess. You have to guess. It’s a May black comedy, remember?
Now, many people think Romeo and Juliet is a love story, instead of a cautionary tale about teen infatuation that ends up with everyone dead. These same people also think The Graduate is a sweet love story, and that it has a happy ending. Not hardly, if you’re paying attention. Here’s the final scene of the movie:
In the back of the bus, it finally dawns on Benjamin Braddock that he has no idea why he was trying to woo fair maid. It was forbidden, so he wanted it. He’s already ambivalent about her. She looks at him and maybe wonders what she saw in him in the first place. It’s a subtle punch line delivered with panache at the end of a rollicking sendup of late sixties suburban ennui and misbehavior. The Heartbreak Kid is just an unfunny attempt to find some ore in the same, played out mine.
All in all, I wished I’d watched Ishtar instead. At least I could have made fun of it. Making sport of dreck is a form of entertainment, I think. It’s the only form of amusement you’ll find if Elaine May is involved.
Tag: 1960s
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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