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.
Seriously, what’s wrong with you? That’s Milton Banana right there. Playing the drums. It’s really him. And you’re not currently listening to him. What’s your excuse? It better be a good one.
The guy practically invented bossa nova drumming. Well, important people like his mother said he did, I think. He’s, like famous. His Wikipedia page uses two sentences to illuminate his Banana-ness. If he was a nobody, they could have done it in one, surely.
Check out his discography. I love that after a few miss-starts with trying to come up with interesting titles for his lps, he finally gives in to his inner Banana and just names them Milton Banana, over and over. George Foreman got nothing on him.
What’s that? You do not possess any Milton Banana? Well, technically, no one can possess Milton Banana. Listen to him play. He’s already so possessed that he would require an exorcism just to tone him back to a regular jazz drummer. But in case you need more Banana than you currently hold, here you go:
I mean, just look at the guy:
Look at him. Drumsticks, Marlboros, and draft beer. A smile that could light up a bowling alley. A mesh shirt that could get any girl from Ipanema’s motor running.
I tell you people, you haven’t lived until you go Bananas.
They call it the Bo Diddley Beat. That’s Bo Diddley doing the Bo Diddley Beat. Bo didn’t want you to get confused about who was doing what, and let the audience know right off who was who. Hey Bo Diddley! If Bo ever had a publicist, I’ll bet he didn’t have to work overly hard. Bo was always a vertically oriented entertainment complex all by hisself.
That beat has a lot of names. Many people call it: shave and a haircut, two bits. If you’re playing in a band below the Gulf of Mexico, er, America, um, well, south or east of the Bay of Campeche, anyway, you might call it the clave rhythm. Some people call it The Hambone. It’s basically straight out of Africa. Others might have done something like it before him, but Bo made it his own thang, and rode it for all it was worth. He was the iPhone and the kleenex and the frigidaire of the beat.
Lots of other guys mined the same ore. There are too many to list. Here are some notable ones.
Buddy Holly
Johnny Otis:
The Miracles:
It’s even buried in the middle of these two, though you have to listen a little harder to hear it:
Bo had unusual tastes in guitars. He played cigar box guitars at first, and made them himself. When he got some notoriety, he started having others made for him, including a “twang machine,” built in the same square shape, but from a solid piece of wood with a neck bolted on, and a regular pickup configuration. I was in Gruhn Guitars in Nashville back in the day, and they had one of his twang machines for sale. If I’d have bought it, I could sell it and retire tomorrow. I think it’s in the Metropolitan Museum of Art nowadays. I bought a Stratocaster instead because I was a broke-ass loser.
The guitar Bo’s playing in the video is his own design as well. Eventually, he had a guy who was laid off or retired or quit or fired or something from Gretsch guitars build the guitars for him. They had custom bodies with Gretsch necks bolted on, and Gretsch hardware. He called them Jupiter Thunderbirds. Bo gave one to Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top, and you can often spot him playing one. Although I doubt he’s still playing the original much. In 2005, Billy convinced Gretsch to throw in the towel and started making Bo’s design in their factory. They call it the Billy-Bo Jupiter Thunderbird.
That’s Norma-Jean Wofford playing her own Jupiter Thunderbird, singing, and shimmying in the Bo Diddley video up top. Somehow I’m reminded of this quote: Remember, Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, but she did it backwards and in high heels.
It can be difficult to write about stuff from the distant past on the intertunnel. Interweb commentary will brook only two settings: I love it, or I hate it, and I hate you for liking it.
This can make it dicey to simply acknowledge stuff, and sometimes mention that it was popular for reasons that escape the observer. For instance, I wrote yesterday about 70s songwriters, and pointed out several influential examples. Almost without exception, I’d have turned the radio to another station if anything they wrote came blattering out of the speaker, Montego Bay notwithstanding. But that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate admire grudgingly acknowledge their popularity. And this is coming from a guy that has made money playing I’m a Believer in public.
So, don’t lose your shit when I start talking about elevator music. MOR, as in Middle of the Road. Easy Listening. It was pretty big back in the late sixties/early seventies. Mom used to listen to it while she vacuumed, for example. To this day, I can’t hear the Sandpipers without wondering where the Hoover backing track went.
Then again, I never hear the Sandpipers. That song was a hit on the regular charts. No, really. That version of that song. It was in the soundtrack of the movie The Sterile Cuckoo, which was more or less a hit, too, in that it made money. This was back when Liza Minnelli was the go-to choice for portraying painfully quirky, somewhat homely manic pixie dream girls. This is a power move when you’re born with deep sea fish eyes, but still have to work. And thanks, Mom and Dad!
I’m singling out the Sandpipers for calumny or kudos, depending on your lack of taste. But there were a lot of bandsgroups bunches of people doing the same sort of de-boned music for weak teeth at about the same time that rock music was becoming really loud and obnoxious and ubiquitous. Off the top of my head, there was The Association, and the slightly more pop-music 5th Dimension. Or (ugh) The Lettermen:
Precious and few are the times I could stand to hear that one. Man, those lyrics:
You don’t know how many times I wished that I could mold you into someone that would cherish me as much as I cherish you
That sounds like a guy that has shallow graves in his garden. Or maybe it’s just me.
It wasn’t all singing. There were tons of instrumental music records out at the same time. Jackie Gleason made a fortune on what he called aural wallpaper. Mantovani, Percy Faith, David Rose, Henry Mancini, and if you were in the mood for something wilder, Esquivel!
Closely related close harmony singing was everywhere for a while, too, until it disappeared just as quickly. Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head was a very popular soft rock hit, but it’s the long sequences in the movie with nothing but vocal harmonies that fit in with, and somewhat energized the genre, even though many found them incongruous with the subject matter:
Mood music like the Sandpipers was easy to dislike, especially in retrospect, and became a punchline later in the seventies. Remember the Blues Brothers solemnly riding the elevator in the old Federal Building in Chicago with Muzak playing while the police and National Guard rally outside?
The easy listening crowd didn’t do themselves any favors by choosing very unwisely among the available pop songs to remake in their signature tapioca style. To wit:
Well, if it wasn’t for the Sandpipers, I never would have enjoyed the adolescent bliss of the mondegreen “One Ton of Mayo.” That’s not a lot to hang your hat on, but then again, it’s not nothing.
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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