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.
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.
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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