“IT JUST HITS ME”: The Collected Anna Costa

    For nearly 15 years, Anna “Ann” Costa graced the Sony Music Archives with her incisive, even profound observations on life’s passing parade. This collection of Ann moments from 1992-2001 has been affectionately recorded by Lynne Barrow, Michael Brooks, Matt Cavaluzzo, Matt Fiveash, Anthony Fountain, Ronnie Grauman, Matt Kelly, Glenn Korman, and Maggie Perrotta, and edited by Marc Kirkeby.

Origins of Her Name

Ann: Everybody calls me Annie. My sister has a fit. It reminds me of the orphans.

The Old Part

(After Matt C. has been out sick for a week, Ann sees him in the tape library.)

Ann: What was the matter?

Matt: I had Lyme disease.

Ann: What’s that?

Matt: It’s a parasite that you get from being bitten by a tick.

Ann: Oh, that’s right, you get it when you go hunting.

Matt: Well, deer do carry the ticks.

Ann: Deer? Where do you live?

Matt: In New Jersey.

Ann: The old part or the new part?

Matt: What?

Ann: The old part or the new part?

Matt: Well, I live where there’s a lot of woods.

Ann: Oh, the old part.

The Good Old Days

Ann: Did you ever go to the movies as a child?

Michael: All the time. We had five movie houses in the suburb where I lived. One was gigantic—held over 3000 people.

Ann: Yes, we had one like that in the Bronx where I used to go. It was Loew’s Paradox.

The Remains of the Day

(Ann and Michael have just walked out of the studio at lunch time, when Ann suddenly points upward at the marks of jet exhaust in the sky.)

Ann: Look—entrails!

Ann’s Health Tips I

Ann: How’s your knee?

Michael: Still not right. Some days it hurts more than others.

Ann: Have you tried holocaustic medicine?

Michael: Is that where they put you in a gas chamber?

Ann: Maybe.

Ann’s Health Tips II

(Weeks later, Ann is still worried about Michael’s knee.)

Ann: Have you tried hypno-allergenic treatment?

Michael: Is that where they look you in the eyes and tell you you’re feeling better?

Ann: Well, you are, aren’t you?

Ann’s Health Tips III

(Ann has brought in some articles on health and nutrition.)

Ann: I gotta give this one to Lynne about zinc—she’s low on that.

Maggie: Zinc? No, she’s low in iron.

Ann: That’s what zinc is.

Ann’s First Aid Tips

(Michael has jammed a finger in a file drawer.)

Ann: Put it in the refrigerator.

Michael: You mean ice it?

Ann: No, put it in the refrigerator.

Michael: But for how long? I can’t just stand there.

Ann: As long as it takes.

Time’s Arrow

(One morning in early January.)

Ann: What year is it today?

Post Mortem

(There has been a gruesome accident in the news.)

Ann: It was a terrible thing. You know, he was DWI—drunk while intoxicated.

Miracles of Construction

(Ann and Michael are riding the elevator one Monday morning.)

Ann: This elevator is bigger than it was on Friday.

Michael: How is that possible?

Ann: They made it bigger over the weekend. It was too small before.

Michael: Yes, but how could they do that?

Ann: They just moved the walls out a bit.

Hair Today

(Ann is not pleased with her new haircut.)

Ann: Oh, well, if I don’t look at it, it’ll grow back faster.

On Television

Ann: I only watch it for the programs.

Woolgathering

(Ann is staring at Michael’s tie, which is patterned and obviously synthetic.)

Ann: Did you knit that?

Michael: No, I can’t knit. I bought it at a store.

Ann: You should always buy wool. It makes a better knot.

Michael: Why is that?

Ann: Because it sticks together better because it comes from sheep.

In the Library

Ann: Are you looking for something?

Michael: Yes, a tape.

(Ann turns and indicates the thousands of tapes behind her.)

Ann: There it is!

Nutrition I

Ann: Here’s the question—which food gives you fiber? The choices are 1) fiber, 2) starch, 3) glucose, and 4) one I can’t remember.

Maggie: I’d say fiber.

Ann: No! Starch.

Maggie: That doesn’t make much sense. Why wouldn’t fiber give you fiber?

Ann: Just let it sit.

Maggie: You mean let it sink in?

Lynne: Does fiber give you starch?

Ann: No!

Nutrition II

Ann: Did you decide?

(Ronnie slowly realizes that Ann is referring to Ronnie and Maggie’s earlier conversation about where to eat lunch.)

Ronnie: American.

Ann: I’ve got to try that shutsi sometime.

Ronnie: What’s that?

Ann: You know, that Japanese stuff you like.

Ronnie: Oh, you mean sushi.

Ann: Yeah, that’s it. Shusi, shushi.

Ronnie: No, sushi.

Ann: Sushi. My nephew goes crazy in California.

Nutrition III

Ann: Did you smoke cigarettes when you were young?

Michael: No, actually I was one of the only young people in England who didn’t smoke back then.

Ann: Yeah, I have this dancer friend—she smokes like a fish.

Nutrition IV

Ann: It’s too cold for salad today.

The Other

(Glenn has explained to Esther that every tape in a particular pile should be handled in one way, with the exception of one tape at the bottom of the pile, which should be handled in a different way. Ann believes that Esther has misunderstood.)

Ann: She thinks every other one.

Glenn: What do you mean?

Ann: She thinks every other one.

Glenn: Do you mean that she thinks they are all the same except for one of them, or that every second one is different?

Ann: No. She thinks every other one.

Ann’s Haiku

(Transcribed by Matt Fiveash)

The bums in the street

They never get sick

They got all the germs inside them

So they fight it off better

Six Degrees of Ann Costa

(As Marc passes, Ann gestures with the Daily News.)

Ann: That’s Channel Five’s brother.

(Translation: The brother of Channel 5 newswoman Roseanne Scotto has opened a restaurant, which is reviewed in the News.)

Boxeo

(It’s the morning after the Oscar de la Hoya vs. Felix Trinidad fight.)

Ann: Did you watch the fight last night?

Michael: No, I’m not a boxing fan.

Ann: It was a good fight. Oscar de la Renta won, I forget the name of the other.

Michael: Feliz Navidad.

Ann: That’s the fella.

Klezmer Fever I

(The Village Voice has run a photo of the alternative-Klezmer band of Archives alumnus Noah Leff.)

Ann: Ronnie, that’s the music they play in Borough Park, right? (She hums “Hava Nagila”.)

Ronnie: Yeah, that’s it.

Ann: The one with the curls—it’s all they got.

Klezmer Fever II

(Ann shows Noah’s band photo to Michael.)

Ann: He used to work here.

Michael: Who?

Ann: The one who used to sit here and listen to music.

Michael (comprehending): Oh!

Ann: They’re awfully good, you know.

Michael: I’m sure they are. Have you heard them?

Ann: No. The trains go to all the wrong places.

Ann’s Favorite Artists I

(Ann is working on a box of tapes by the band The Candy Butchers.)

Ann: Maggie, this band is called Candy Butchers, right?

Maggie: Yes, Ann.

Ann: It’s probably a bunch of lesbians.

Maggie: Exactly what do you mean by that?

Ann: You know, they call lesbians butch.

Ann’s Favorite Artists II

(The department’s monthly shipment of gratis CDs has arrived.)

Ann: Maggie, did you get anything nice for gratis?

Maggie: Yes—Fleetwood Mac, “Rumors”.

Ann: What? There’s a rumor you sleep with Mac?

Ann’s Favorite Artists III

Ann: Who’s that trumpet player that sounds like Herb Alpert?

(Answer: Herb Alpert.)

Ann’s Favorite Artists IV

Ann: Anthony, what’s the name of that French singer who died?

(Answer: Edith Piaf.)

Ann’s Favorite Artists V

Ann: What’s the name of that blues singer?

Matt K: Which one?

Ann: The one that’s always singin’ the blues.

(Answer: B.B. King.)

Ann’s Favorite Instruments

Ann: What is that brass instrument they play at funerals that starts with a T?

All: Trumpet? Tuba? Trombone?

Ann: No, no, no.

(Answer: ? However, recent scholarship by A. Fountain argues convincingly that Ann was in fact referring to “Taps”.)

Poultry I

(Ronnie is returning from the ladies’ room through the narrow corridor by the video shelves. Ann is walking towards her. Ann sticks her arms straight out in front of her.)

Ann: Chicken!

Ronnie: What?

Ann: Chicken!

(Ann is now getting quite close and Ronnie steps to the side to allow her to pass.)

Ann: See? You lost. You moved to the side.

Poultry II

(Glenn has returned to work after recovering from a stomach virus.)

Ann: Was it the chicken?

Glenn: What chicken? I didn’t have any chicken.

Ann: What’d you have?

Glenn: I’m not sure. I think I had a turkey sandwich.

Ann: Ah! There’s the chicken!

Diagnosis

Ann: Ronnie, when you were small, did you ever fall on your head?

Ronnie: Actually, I did—I have a scar.

Ann: I thought so.

X Files Moment

(Glenn encounters Ann in the elevator. She looks troubled.)

Glenn: What’s the matter, Ann?

Ann: It’s my dog. He’s not right.

Glenn: Did you take him to the vet?

Ann: It’s not like that.

Glenn: What do you mean?

Ann: …I think he knows something.

Ann on Science I

(The pay raises took effect June 1, but weeks later the paperwork still hasn’t gone through, and everyone will be getting an extra check to make up the difference.)

Ann: Oh, so it’s radioactive?

Ann on Science II

Ann: If I put hot water in the refrigerator, will it blow up?

Language Barrier

(Ann is listening to her Walkman as Matt Kelly walks by.)

Ann: How do I get an American station in here?

Matt: What do you mean?

Ann: It’s only Spanish.

(Matt turns the dial to WCBS-FM. Ann thanks him.)

Beatles Riff

(…in which we fade up to hear Lynne saying…)

Lynne: Helen Keller.

Ann: Isn’t she the one who was crazy?

Maggie: No, she’s the one who was blind.

Ann: Didn’t she write a song called “Helen Skelter”?

Maggie: Do you mean “Helter Skelter”?

Ann: Yes.

Maggie: That’s Charles Manson. Is that who you mean?

Ann: Helen Keller was blind… I thought she was a poet.

Maggie: She was blind, but she wasn’t a poet, she was a pilot.

Ann: Maggie, you are a comedian… (musing) Yeah, he wouldn’t record any of Charles Manson’s songs.

All: Who?

Ann: Terry Melcher, Doris Day’s son.

Metaphysical I

(Ann greets Matt Fiveash as he comes in one morning.)

Ann: Hi, Matt. Everybody’s in so far.

Metaphysical II

(Ann, arriving, has seen John Vega’s door ajar and called “Hello,” but now sees him back at the copier.)

Ann: I said, “Hello, John,” but I guess the door was empty.

Metaphysical III

(Ann needs a roll of spining tape. As he usually does, Matt Kelly “bowls” it to her, and this time it goes directly to her feet.)

Matt: After all these years, Ann, I’m finally getting the hang of it.

Ann: Either that, or the floor’s getting straight.

Metaphysical IV

Ann: I’d rather have closets than furniture.

Metaphysical V

Ann: When are you leaving for your vacation?

Anthony: I’m leaving early, around 4 p.m.

Ann: That’s good, pinpoints of life.

Maggie: Ann, what does the expression “pinpoints of life” mean?

Ann: Something unexpected, when something throws off your plan, like when it rains… The Pinpoints of Life—how could he catch the plane if he has to work on the book?

The Muse

(Ann has come out with yet another observation.)

Glenn: Ann, that’s very profound.

Ann: Yeah, the TV’s in the front room, and it just hits me.

 

IGOR’S LAST NAME

(In a perfectly serious conversation at work, a colleague said, “But I don’t know Igor’s last name,” and I knew at once that it was magic time.  If you think the classical-country-crossover craze is over, think again.)

He told me he had long-hauled in from Moscow

‘Cause Austin’s where the music rules our hearts

He told me he would only stay at Costco

Until his compositions hit the charts

He’d cuddle up and call me his Petrushka

He said the way I danced was like ballet

Was the whole thing just a circus polka

And did he really take off for LA

(chorus)

For me the rite of spring always meant lovin’

And what’s a Firebird without a flame

So why am I alone here in this bar room

And I still don’t know Igor’s last name

Then one night the fireworks were over

His trailer hitch uncoupled and was gone

The classics that he left of course I cover

But wonder why the harmony went wrong

(chorus)

For me the rite of spring always meant lovin’

And what’s a Firebird without a flame

Now this song of love has gone atonal

And I still don’t know Igor’s last name

(And who’s Nijinsky?)

I still don’t know Igor’s last name

©Marc Kirkeby 2013

 

I LEFT MY CAR IN NASSAU COUNTY

(Grammy Song of the Year: 50^th Anniversary)

 

I left my car in Nassau County

Outside the mall, it stalled on me

I drove it down Old Country Road

I heard something explode

I nursed it through the parking lot, but it’s shot

My wife’s still there, in Nassau County

She opted for a shopping spree

To tow it back here from Nassau County

Would cost more than it’s worth to me

 

FATTY STOVES

 

(For Fairport Convention fans mainly)

A Saturday, a Saturday,

And the first one of the week

Lord Belfry’s wife nipped into the pub

To wet her lovely beak

And when two large ones she had quaffed

She looked not very far

And there she saw Mister Fatty Stoves

A-leanin’ on the bar

“A drink with me, Mister Fatty Stoves,

A drink and then, who knows?

For I’ve a Rover round the back

And foreign underclothes”

“Oh, I can’t go there, I won’t go there,

I can’t go there no how,

By the rings on yer mobile I can tell

You be Lord Belfry’s frau”

“What if I am Lord Belfry’s frau?

Lord Belfry’s in the den

Watchin’ Ultimate Darts and snooker

And that weather bitch at ten”

A Geordie who was lurkin’ round

And liked to take the piss

He hit Lord Belfry’s speed dial

Ere that automotive kiss

“What larks, what larks!” cried Fatty Stoves

As the lady’s phone rang Bach

“I last got my leg over

In the springtime of folk rock”

“Just put him on,” Lord Belfry said

When the mobile’s tinkling ceased

“We’ll settle this thing man to man

Or phone to phone, at least”

“You can save your breath,” the lady said

Eyeing Fatty hungrily

“I’d rather Fatty’s sloppy love

Than you and your big TV”

Fatty Stoves then seized the phone

And boldly said, “Ahem…”

But Belfry interrupted, saying,

“Listen, Sonny Jim…

“You can sit out there and freeze your arse

Or give this place a try

For I’ve got Stellas in the fridge

And Premier League on Sky”

Now Fatty eyed his lady fair

Her like he’d never seen

But then quoth he into the phone,

“Just how big is that screen?”

“Oh, wankers all!” the lady cried

As Fatty zipped and fled

“Live entertainment’s got no chance—

They’ll watch at home instead.”

 

(This classic “chilled” ballad recounts the true story of village cricket legend Caractacus “Bats” Belfry, the Eighth Earl from the Right, and his third or fourth wife, the former Flotilla de Boateng.)

 

ALL THE GOOD TITLES ARE TAKEN

 

“What Mrs. Dewey Did with the New Jell-o!”

(The Jell-o Company, General Foods Corp., 1933)

 

“The Effects of Management and Sex on Carcasses of Yearling Cattle”

(Foster & Miller, Univ. of Missouri College of Agriculture, Research Bulletin, 1933)

“Wisconsin Grouse Problems”

(Grange, WI Conservation Dept., 1948)

“The Story of Margarine”

(Riepma, Public Affairs Press, 1970)

 

With thanks to my friend, the rare book dealer Peter Masi:

masibook@verizon.net

 

 

RISING SONS

(Notes for CD reissue, copyright Sony Music Entertainment)

 

    Just this side of the Pacific, out where Route 66 empties onto the Boulevard of Broken Dreams, a band called the Rising Sons came together in 1964, made some increasingly frustrating grabs for the brass ring, and broke up in 1966 with only one released single to its credit.

    The band would be forgotten, like so many almost-weres from those giddy years, and these Columbia recordings probably would never have seen the (laser) light of day, if the Rising Sons did not represent the first recorded efforts (as front men, anyway) of Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder, two of the most consistently appealing, eccentric, eclectic artists on the American music scene.

    Those two names, and the unavailability of the music, have instead made the Rising Sons more “legendary” with each passing year. The material has teetered on the brink of release for a decade or more. Now, at last, with Cooder part of another thinking-person’s “supergroup,” Little Village (with John Hiatt, Nick Lowe and Jim Keltner), and Taj’s solo work educating a new generation in the glory of the blues, the Rising sons rise again, through the efforts of producers Bob Irwin and Amy Herot, engineer Vic Anesini, and Taj Mahal himself—to show us that behind the legend, there’s music worth remembering. What happened—and didn’t—along the way forms the following tale.

    We open in Cambridge, Massachusetts, circa 1964, where a young folk-blues performer who calls himself Taj Mahal is trying to run a hootenanny at Club 47. He’s impressed by a 12-string guitar player who calls himself Jesse Lee Kincaid, with a technique so true, “I knew he learned from someone good.” Kincaid learned, in fact, from his uncle, a West Coast player and teacher (and Folkways recording artist) named Fred Gerlach, whom Taj knows by reputation.

    Kincaid has wandered east as a disciple of another blues master, the Reverend Gary Davis, and now joins Taj in a community that includes Richard and Mimi Farina, Geoff and Maria Muldaur, Ron “Pigpen” McKernan (pre-Grateful Dead), and Al Wilson, later of Canned Heat.

    Like all wonderful moments, this one starts to fade, and Kincaid convinces Taj to come back with him to the perhaps greener pastures of Los Angeles—all the while talking about this friend of his, a teenaged guitar phenom named Ryland Cooder, who also studied with Kincaid’s uncle.

    A couple of gigs bring the duo as far as Detroit, where they make a deal to drive someone else’s Cadillac to L.A. Taj still speaks glowingly of that drive across country—his first—as he and Kincaid envision their band. They will introduce the teen masses to country blues, mixing in Kincaid’s Beatles- and Dylan-influenced originals. Babylon glitters on the horizon.

    With Taj’s help, we envision the Ry Cooder of late 1964: the son of folklorists, playing guitar since he was four, hanging around McCabe’s Music (a folk bastion in Santa Monica) and learning from blues legends at 10, performing at L.A.’s Ash Grove (another folk and blues spot, now the Improv) at 15, recording with Jackie DeShannon and Pamela Polland, and now, at 17, “smoking cigars and driving a maroon ’47 Packard four-door saloon with a straight-8 and whitewalls.” He joins up.

    The threesome next adds Gary Marker, who is another childhood friend of Cooder’s and a jazz bassist who attended Boston’s Berklee School of Music on a scholarship from down beat magazine. Marker in turn introduces them to a jazz drummer named Ed Cassidy, who will participate in their first recording sessions before moving on to the band that will make him famous, Spirit.

    If you’re keeping score at home, that’s one African-American blues interpreter, two white kids smitten by the blues, and two white jazz cats, plunging into the L.A. pop world in what Taj sardonically calls “the days of Sonny and Cher.” The Beach Boys rule. Phil Spector may or may not be God. “Shindig” is on ABC-TV, with Leon Russell in the house band. The buzz is for new groups called the Byrds, the Turtles, and Paul Revere and the Raiders.

    The Rising Sons perform at something called the Teenage Fair, a then-annual event at the Hollywood Palladium, where they’re paid to demonstrate Martin electric guitars at the McCabe’s booth (despite the fact that their bassist and two guitarists have virtually no prior experience with electric instruments). They are noticed, much as Dizzy Gillespie would be noticed at a polka festival. Gigs multiply, demos circulate, ears are whispered into. In June 1965, Allen Stanton of Columbia Records signs the band, at the urging of Billy James, another Columbia staffer. And that’s where heartaches begin.

    You can’t entirely blame Columbia for not knowing what to do with the Rising Sons. The company’s experience with rock groups dated back about five minutes. There were the beginnings of a rock- (read white-) blues scene—Elektra had signed Paul Butterfield, MGM had the Blues Project—but those artists hadn’t really sold any records yet. With the impact of the Beatles’ album sales just starting to sink in, rock and roll was still a singles business. The idea of rock artists who wouldn’t need hit singles hadn’t yet penetrated the industry’s, uh, consciousness.

    So Columbia wants hit singles. Columbia assigns its star (and only) rock producer, Terry Melcher, to work with the Rising Sons. Melcher, the Byrds’ and Raiders’ producer, is given the task—never quite defined, maybe impossible—of getting the Rising Sons to do for country blues what the Byrds have done for Bob Dylan.

    “But the thing about the Byrds was, they were all going in the same musical direction,” Melcher observes. “Here you had guys who should have been in two different groups. If I had it to do over, I would’ve found some Beatle-type group and put Kincaid in there, and had another group with Ry and Taj.”

    Before Melcher’s first session with the group, Cassidy is replaced by Kevin Kelley, a first cousin of Chris Hillman of the Byrds. “Just going through our growing pains,” Taj says; they want more of a rock drum sound (and Kelley owns a van big enough to carry their equipment).

    Busier and busier with the Byrds and the Raiders—and still only22 himself—Melcher never does bridge the two styles. He favors the country blues side, because “you look for what’s unique, and no one else was doing that.” Their first and only single (released in February 1966) consists of a Skip James song (“The Devil’s Got My Woman”) backed with a Reverend Gary Davis song (“Candy Man”), chosen as much to showcase Cooder’s guitar work as for any other reason. Certainly there is nothing like it on AM radio that year, FM as we know it doesn’t yet exist, and the record gets all the airplay of a Conelrad test.

    The search for hit-single material intensifies. Melcher brings in a Gerry Goffin-Carole King tune, “Take a Giant Step,” that would also be recorded by the Monkees. “I liked that lyric, but I knew it had to slow way down,” Taj says. It slows down a bit here, and even more as one of the signature songs of Taj’s solo career.

    The band also slows down another song making the L.A. rounds in those days, Linda Albertano’s “2:10 Train” (Cooder had performed it with Pamela Polland), giving it a gently loping feeling that, to these ears, makes it the find of this collection. Others enjoy it, too: Linda Ronstadt, then of the Stone Poneys, is a frequent studio guest during those Rising Sons sessions, and when the band has finally broken up, she approaches Gary Marker at a club and asks to borrow the arrangement.

    Typically for those Zimmermaniac times, there is a cover of a then-unreleased Dylan song, “Walkin’ Down the Line,” with an opening riff that harks back to Cooder’s work with Jackie DeShannon.

    Rather ahead of its time, the band also admires Robert Johnson, covering “Dust My Broom” and “Last Fair Deal Gone Down,” among many other traditional or semi-traditional blues standards. Preserved here are “Corrin, Corrina,” “.44 Blues,” and “If the River Was Whiskey (Divin’ Duck Blues).” A couple of band compositions, “I Got a Little” and “By and By (Poor Me),” draw heavily on this style as well.

    Add side trips into country (Polland’s “Tulsa County”) and New Orleans R&B (Shirley and Lee’s “Let the Good Times Roll”) and folk-rock (Jesse Colin Young’s “Four in the Morning”), and you have a concise list of the influences that are just beginning, circa 1966, to steer rock music away from Top 40.

    It’s worth adding that Kincaid’s originals can hold their own with the pop songs of the day, although even with Cooder on guitar and Taj on harp they have roughly zip in common with Jimmy Reed or Howlin’ Wolf. If you’ve got the CD, you might try programming “Sunny’s Dream,” “11^th Street Overcrossing,” “The Girl With Green Eyes,”

“Spanish Lace Blues” and “Flyin’ So High” for a glimpse of what might have been if Kincaid’s dream of emulating John Lennon had come true.
    From the band’s perspective, the most frustrating part of this studio experience is that they know the impact of their live shows isn’t coming across on tape. For a moment there, the Rising Sons are about the hottest thing on the L.A. club scene. The pinnacle may be a spring 1965 “Hoot Night” performance at the Troubadour, at the end of which David Crosby jumps up on a table and leads the crowd in chanting “Long live the Rising Sons!”

    The closest these recordings come to capturing that feeling is “Statesboro Blues,” the group’s live showstopper, taken at a Keystone Kops tempo. (If you think it’s fast here, consider that at one club date, the Rising Sons played it so fast and for so long that Ed Cassidy injured a wrist, which put him in a cast and hastened his departure from the band.)

    Even without an album—without a hit—the momentum keeps building. Billy James is talking them up as “the American Rolling Stones.” After winning over some reluctant club owners (“We were an interracial band,” Gary Marker says, “and you were supposed to be either white or black”), they play up and down Sunset Strip, at Ciro’s, at the Whisky-a-Go-Go, at the Trip, opening for the likes of Otis Redding and Martha and the Vandellas. Skitch Henderson catches the act, and gets them on the “Tonight” show. (The tape, like most of Johnny Carson’s first decade, is later destroyed.) Dick Clark’s “Where the Action Is,” a sort of on-location version of “American Bandstand,” has them lip-syncing “Giant Step” on a beach. They even do a brief promo tour for, yes, Van Heusen shirts.

    Filmed but never aired is their performance—including acting—in a pilot for 20^th Century-Fox TV called “The

 Sheriff,” a “contemporary western” starring Gilbert Roland. (These are the days, remember, when a movie that has nothing to do with music will stop for two minutes for a number by the Lovin’ Spoonful.)
    For a while, then, they’re at least having fun. The clubhouse, so to speak, is Taj’s home in Santa Monica, a.k.a. “the Taj Garage,” right near the 11^th St. overpass of the Santa Monica Freeway. Touring blues greats stay for free in

 exchange for showing Taj everything they know. The band’s best friend-announcer-researcher (and even arranger, on “Giant Step”) is Barry Hansen, later to become radio host Dr. Demento. Everyone, including Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, comes to see their shows. (Cooder will later play on the Stones’ Let It Bleed.) Gary Marker recalls trying to go to Disneyland with Jackie DeShannon and Jimmy Page (pre- Yardbirds) and being turned away for (his and Jimmy’s) long hair. O youth! O beauty!
    Recording sessions continue into 1966. Time and again, Columbia seems on the brink of making some sort of big push for the group, which somehow never materializes. The band members are fighting, with Melcher, with the record company, with each other. An entire album is mixed, mastered, ready to go—and mysteriously buried. Everyone but Taj is disgusted with the whole project, and finally he gives in, too. By the autumn of that year, it’s all over, and the tapes go into the Columbia west coast vault, where they sit, more or less untouched, for 25 years.

    After all this time, some bad feelings linger, as they will. But Gary Marker—now a journalist living in Silicon Valley, with no apparent axe to grind—offers this view: “We were the problem… We had difficulties distilling our multiple musical agendas down to a product that would sell. We had no actual leader, no clear musical vision… I think [Melcher] went out of his way to make us happy—within his scope of knowledge. He tried just about everything he could, including the live, acoustic session that produced ‘2:10 train'” (as well as “11^th Street Overcrossing”).

    And yet time has not been so hard on the Rising Sons. Taj and Cooder have managed to make successful careers in pursuit of musical agendas far from the pop mainstream, and have helped to introduce tens of thousands of rock and rollers to the sources of that music. Jesse Kincaid, who cut some singles for Capitol, now fronts a country band, Jesse Kincaid and Silverado, in the San Francisco area, and operates a small record company specializing in classical guitar. Gary Marker put together an influential jazz-rock band called Fusion, with an album for Atco, before moving on to architectural design as well as writing. Kevin Kelley spent a couple of years with the Byrds and then Fever Tree after the Rising Sons called it quits, and today is a songwriter and musician in Los Angeles. Ed Cassidy, now in his seventies, remains the oldest practicing rock drummer, still working with Spirit and other artists. Several of the interviews for these notes were punctuated by the sounds of small children: here, kids, is what your fathers did back when everything in music—in life—seemed possible.

    The Rising Sons’ story comes full circle, after a fashion, in a Manhattan recording studio on a rainy Friday afternoon in June 1992, when Taj Mahal puts vocals to three Rising Sons instrumental tracks, “Dust My Broom,” “Last Fair Deal Gone Down,” and “Baby, What You Want Me to Do?,” a Jimmy Reed (and Elvis) standard. (Taj says there were vocal tracks recorded originally, but they seem to have disappeared.) The voice is a little deeper with age, and the arrangements are not what he would choose today, but the feeling is still there, and the impact. The blues, thank God, remain an indelible part of our musical culture, and the Rising Sons can finally take their place in that.

 

MENU ITEMS/SPECIALS OF THE DAY

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THE MUSIC MAN

 (Notes for CD reissue of original Broadway cast album.  Copyright Angel Records/EMI.)

    Today’s trivia question: what do Ray Bolger, Art Carney, Dan Dailey, Phil Harris, Danny Kaye, Gene Kelly, Bert Parks, and Jason Robards, Jr. have in common?

    All of them turned down the role of Harold Hill in Meredith Willson’s The Music Man, before Robert Preston—a non-singing, non-dancing movie actor—took it, and went on to give perhaps the finest performance by a man in the history of the American musical theater.

    It’s an American-dream kind of story, just as The Music Man is an American-dream kind of show: a cymbal-smacking Broadway smash with book, music, and lyrics by a 55 year-old theatrical newcomer; and a nostalgic, sentimental tale of small-town Iowa that finally won over the New York sophisticates.

    In SEVENTY-SIX TROMBONES, The Music Man added one of the last standards to the canon of that venerable American tradition, marching-band music; in TILL THERE WAS YOU, it produced the only Broadway show tune to be covered by the Beatles. In what must have been the truest fulfillment of his dream, Meredith Willson lived to see his creation performed by countless schools, community theaters, and stock companies, from Des Moines to China. Whenever you read this, somewhere Harold Hill is still hawking his band instruments to the skeptical townspeople of River City, Iowa.

    The show would have been a hit without Robert Preston, but not the same hit. He mesmerized his audiences, just as Harold Hill does. He developed a style of rhythmic patter-singing (compare Rex Harrison’s in My Fair Lady) so engaging that most listeners surely did not even notice his limited vocal range. He had never danced, but moved like a dancer: for proof, see the movie (which, adding insult to injury, was not offered to Preston until Cary Grant refused the part). Of all Morton Da Costa’s contributions to the show, his convincing Preston to give it a try must rank highest.

    And he apparently did take some convincing. Throughout his career, Preston had the reputation of being an odd bird where casting was concerned, turning down parts at which other actors would have leapt. Before The Music Man, his best-known film was probably the 1939 Beau Geste with Gary Cooper and Ray Milland. Otherwise, he chiefly played bad guys in bad movies. But he had begun his career as a (teenaged) stage actor with the Pasadena Playhouse, and in 1949, fed up with the film roles he was being offered, he abandoned Hollywood, moved to New York, and returned to the stage, appearing in such plays as Twentieth Century, The Male Animal, and The Tender Trap.

    During those same years, a songwriter and radio bandleader named Meredith Willson was working and re-working a musical story about his boyhood in Mason City, Iowa—largely at the urging of his friend Frank Loesser and, later, the producer Kermit Bloomgarden. As a boy, Willson had played flute in his town band, starting a career that led him first to the John Philip Sousa band, then to the New York Philharmonic, where he played under Toscanini and Stravinsky, among other conductors. Prodded by his mother (said to be the model for Marian Paroo) to become a conductor himself, Willson moved to the west coast, from the San Francisco Symphony to the Western Division of NBC Radio, where he served as musical director of such programs as “Maxwell House Showboat” and “Good News.” His song “You and I” was a number one hit for Glenn Miller in 1941; his “May the Good Lord Bless and Keep You” became the radio theme song for Tallulah Bankhead. During World War II, Willson helped organize the War Department’s “V-Disc” series of recordings for troops overseas.

    Through eight years and 40 songs and 30 drafts—including a period of collaboration with Franklin Lacey, who shares story credit—Willson developed the show, mostly alone, which would make The Music Man one of the very rare Broadway hits with book, music, and lyrics by the same person (Loesser had just achieved it with The Most Happy Fella).

    Willson also credited his director, Morton Da Costa, with a major role in shaping the Broadway production. Da Costa had had a moderate musical hit with Plain and Fancy, but he was best known for his work on straight plays, including Auntie Mame and No Time for Sergeants.

    As word of the forthcoming show spread, that word became “corn,” which would be the only real obstacle Willson faced on his way to Broadway. Some potential backers were reluctant. Columbia, RCA Victor, and Decca all passed on the original cast album before Capitol Records took a chance.

    Once the show began playing to real audiences, however, those concerns vanished. The Philadelphia critics loved the tryout there. Not only was Preston brilliant, he was far from alone onstage. The gorgeous soprano of Barbara Cook, heard previously by Broadway audiences in Plain and Fancy and (briefly) Candide, made a wholly successful “straight” counterpoint to Preston’s shifty con man. David Burns and Helen Raymond made the most of the comic roles of the mayor and his wife. And Eddie Hodges tugged at the heart in the Willson-surrogate role of a little boy fighting a lisp.

    Willson took pains to capture accurately the musical world of the American “sticks” circa 1912, which led to another casting coup: the Buffalo Bills, a championship barbershop quartet who had recorded for Decca, made their Broadway debut as the River City school board, who just can’t resist a chance to harmonize.

    After the show’s December 19, 1957 Broadway premiere, the New York critics harmonized, too, giving The Music Man rave reviews that mostly began (or were headlined with) puns on “corn,” as in, “This song and dance show is pure corn, the best quality corn I ever tried…” (Emory Lewis, Cue magazine), or, “…such fresh, genial and warmhearted corn that it is not only delightful but, in some paradoxical manner, boldly original” (Richard Watts, Jr., New York Post).

    The “money” review was also a rave: Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times called it “a marvelous show, rooted in wholesome and comic tradition. If Mark Twain could have collaborated with Vachel Lindsay, they might have devised a rhythmic lark like The Music Man, which is as American as apple pie and a Fourth of July oration.” John Chapman of The Daily News, not normally given to hyperbole, called it “one of the few great musical comedies of the last 26 years,” ranking it with Of Thee I Sing and Guys and Dolls.

    The show became not only a hit but a phenomenon, beating out the season’s other Broadway classic, West Side Story, for the Tony award for Best Musical (Preston, Cook, and Burns also won Tonys), which annoyed some in the New York theatrical community and created a mild anti-Music Man backlash. This prompted Atkinson to return to the show nine months later and write, “The Music Man retains its popularity because it has a winning spirit. In an angry, ominous world, everyone is hungry for a guileless evening in the theatre… In both the music and the narrative, Mr. Willson has just the right combination of affection and irony to compose a lovable cartoon… Life was never so simple as this, but Mr. Willson and his colleagues have made it believable by working together in a uniformly exuberant style.”

    The Capitol LP earned an RIAA Gold Record award within a year, and continuing sales spawned a second album, And Then I Wrote the Music Man, featuring Willson and his wife Rini talking about and singing songs from the show. Willson also published a Music Man-centered autobiography, But He Doesn’t Know the Territory (Putnam).

    The show ran and ran, with Eddie Albert and a repentant Bert Parks following Preston on Broadway. By the final curtain, The Music Man had become the second longest-running musical to open in the 1950s (after My Fair Lady; The Sound of Music would eventually bump it into third place). Road-company productions have starred such talents as Forrest Tucker, Van Johnson, Darren McGavin, Tony Randall, and John Raitt. The movie version, starring Preston, Shirley Jones, Paul Ford, Hermione Gingold, Buddy Hackett, and Ron Howard, was a hit in the theaters on its way to becoming a Sunday-afternoon (and home video) chestnut.

    Meredith Willson went on to write one more hit, The Unsinkable Molly Brown, among other works, all of them very much in the shadow of The Music Man. At this writing, Barbara Cook has not had another Broadway starring vehicle to match this, but her reputation has grown through concerts and cabaret, until there is probably no American woman singer of Broadway material more admired (even revered).

    The only real sadness here is that Robert Preston never found another musical that showcased his talent this well. The closest may have been Jerry Herman’s Mack and Mabel (opposite Bernadette Peters), and I Do! I Do! (Mary Martin), but mostly he found himself in such disappointments as We Take the Town, Ben Franklin in Paris and The Prince of Grand Street. Late in his career, he returned to Hollywood and enjoyed a revival of sorts courtesy of Blake Edwards, in the films S.O.B. and Victor/Victoria.

    Here, with a few comments, is the story:

    We open on a train, travelling through Iowa on the Fourth of July, 1912, with what may be Willson’s most remarkable invention, ROCK ISLAND. As Arthur Masella, who directed a 1989 New York City Opera production of the show, said, “Willson spent about eight minutes on a scene that is built around a rhythm, without a note of music underneath it. Yet it’s incredibly musical. He then took that rhythm and incorporated it into the character of Harold Hill, which is evident in the dialogue and in songs like YA GOT TROUBLE.”

    The train is filled with salesmen, grousing about how hard business has become in this “modren” age. It’s especially hard because of a con man named Harold Hill, whose scam is selling band instruments with a promise to form and instruct a boys’ band, then skipping town. The next travelling salesman to pass through is likely to be tarred and feathered.

    One of the salesmen has had his back to us through all this, and when someone remarks that Hill could never work his con in skeptical, “hawkeye” Iowa, the stranger stands, turns, says, “Gentlemen, you intrigue me. I think I’ll have to give Iowa a try,” and jumps off the train. It is of course Hill himself (Preston).

    He lands in the middle of River City, Iowa, where the townspeople, gathered for the holiday, give him a typically chilly welcome (IOWA STUBBORN). By coincidence, Hill discovers, an old friend and co-conspirator of his, Marcellus Washburn (Iggie Wolfington), has gone straight and settled in River City. Marcellus warns him not to try the band-instrument scam here, because of a tough woman librarian and music teacher who will reveal him. Hill is intrigued rather than discouraged, and even more so when he learns that a new pool table has arrived in town.

    In a flash, he has his pitch all worked out: the pool table threatens the moral foundations of River City life, and can be combated only by the creation of a River City boys’ band. His mesmerizing patter (YA GOT TROUBLE) sends the townspeople into a panic, and he’s in business.

    Utterly unimpressed, however, is the librarian, Marian Paroo (Barbara Cook), who rebuffs Hill’s advances. Hill departs for the moment, she returns home, and we meet her widowed Irish mother (Pert Kelton), and her lisping, withdrawn little brother, Winthrop (Eddie Hodges). As she gives a PIANO LESSON to a local girl, Marian’s mind wanders, dwelling on her loneliness and her dreams of love (GOODNIGHT MY SOMEONE).

    Over at the high school gymnasium, River City’s Fourth of July pageant is in excruciating progress, led by the mayor’s wife, Eulalie MacKecknie Shinn (Helen Raymond), and punctuated by a running argument among the school board (the Buffalo Bills), who never agree on anything. Hill arrives and works his magic, describing how their sons will take their place among the great marching bands of the day (SEVENTY-SIX TROMBONES).

    The situation is not without problems: the pool table, it turns out, is owned by Mayor Shinn (David Burns) himself, and he directs the school board to obtain Hill’s credentials as a band leader. Hill, however, is more than equal to the challenge, turning the foursome into a barbershop quartet (SINCERE). They will never argue again.

    On his way to his hotel, he again encounters Marian, who vows to conduct her own investigation into his claim to be a graduate of the Gary, Indiana Conservatory, Class of ’05. Next, Hill finds Marcellus, who suggests that Marian may not be the paragon she seems. Hill is of course delighted: THE SADDER-BUT-WISER GIRL FOR ME.

    More Marian-gossip now comes his way from Mrs. Shinn and the Wa Tan Ye Girls, who hate the librarian. Marian, they believe, was “involved” with the late “Miser Madison,” the richest man in town, who “left River City the library building, but he gave all the books to her.” As they gossip, they seem to turn into a flock of hens (PICK-A-LITTLE, TALK-A-LITTLE), to which the now-harmonizing school board adds its own counterpoint (GOODNIGHT LADIES).

    The next Saturday afternoon, “Professor” Hill resumes his pursuit of MARIAN THE LIBRARIAN, who is beginning to succumb to his charms. It continues that night on her mother’s front porch, where Hill also wins over her mother and brother. When he finally leaves, thwarted again, Mrs. Paroo asks Marian what she’s waiting for, and Marian replies: MY WHITE KNIGHT.

    Another Saturday rolls around: the Shinns are bickering, Marian has found a reference book that proves Harold Hill is a fake, but all of this takes a back seat to the arrival of THE WELLS FARGO WAGON, River City’s commercial link to the outside world, which today is delivering the band instruments. When Marian sees her little brother’s delight, she rips the incriminating page from the book. As the curtain falls, her opinion of Professor Hill is clearly changing.

    Act Two opens three days later, with the ladies of River City rehearsing an “interpretive” dance number for the upcoming Ice Cream Sociable, with the school board providing vocal accompaniment: IT’S YOU. But they are interrupted by the town’s teenagers, who want to try out the “hot” new dance Professor Hill has taught them, the one-step. As Marcellus sings SHIPOOPI, Hill leads a no-longer-reluctant Marian through the step. She catches her breath, he almost convinces her that his “think system” of band instruction is not just hot air, and the ladies—stunned that she can actually dance—begin to accept her.

    On Wednesday night, on the porch of his hotel, Hill once more deflects an attempt by the school board to get his credentials by leading them in song (LIDA ROSE), while on the Paroos’ porch, Marian is wondering how to let Hill know how she feels (WILL I EVER TELL YOU).

    We next catch up with Professor Hill returning from a fishing expedition with Winthrop, who has plainly adopted him, and the little boy proudly sings the song—with barely an “s” in it—that the Professor has taught him, GARY, INDIANA.

    The night of the Ice Cream Sociable, Marian is again on the porch, thinking of Hill, when a man, hurrying past, asks where he can find the mayor: it is one of the salesmen from the opening scene, stopping off in River City for his revenge on Harold Hill. Marian protects the man she loves by pretending to fall for the salesman, distracting him until he has to run to catch his train. When Hill himself arrives moments later, Marian can’t bring herself to tell him, or to admit that she knows he’s a fraud. Throwing away her Iowa caution, she agrees to meet him at “the foot bridge,” a local lovers’ lane.

    Cut to the foot bridge, 15 minutes later: couples are dancing, the Sociable is in progress, and Harold is waiting for Marian. But it’s Marcellus who arrives instead, telling him that the band uniforms are here, which means it’s time for the Professor to take the money and get out of town. Hill, though, is strangely reluctant to leave. Marcellus goes, Marian arrives, and confesses that she’s known the truth about him, but hasn’t turned him in, because of all he’s given to her and the town: TILL THERE WAS YOU. For the first time in his life, Harold Hill finds himself in love.

    Hill and Marian return to her house, each lost in thought, but events are now beyond their control. The salesman has sounded the alarm, Marcellus arrives to warn Hill, but again he won’t leave, even when Marian tells him to go. Men arrive with handcuffs, and Hill is arrested.

    The final scene returns to the gymnasium, where an impromptu “trial” takes place: Hill is brought in, Mayor Shinn condemns him, but Marian speaks up, and it is soon apparent that the townspeople—even the mayor’s wife—appreciate what he’s done. As judgment is about to be rendered, the band members arrive in uniform, and Professor Hill must finally demonstrate his “think system.” The performance is pretty awful, the melody barely detectable… but the parents love it, and all is forgiven. As the curtain falls again, Harold Hill is clearly about to settle down.

    The show has been revived on Broadway only once, in a 1980 production that starred Dick Van Dyke and Meg Bussert, but The Music Man has entered the fabric of American culture in a way that few Broadway shows can match. When President Ronald Reagan left office in 1989, The New York Times published an editorial comparing him to… Harold Hill. Politics aside, we all seem to want to believe that that band can really play.

 

TWO BY TWO

 (Notes for CD reissue of original Broadway cast album.  Copyright Sony Music Entertainment Inc.)

    Two by Two, by the numbers: Richard Rodgers’s thirty-eighth Broadway musical, and his return after a five-year absence, marking his fiftieth anniversary as a Broadway composer. Danny Kaye’s first appearance in a real Broadway show (discounting a couple of vaudeville-style solo turns) in twenty-nine years. A cast of only eight. A respectable run of 343 performances.

    Appropriately, though, the key number here is two, because Two by Two was really two shows: the one that opened November 10, 1970 at the Imperial Theatre and, in its recorded form, is preserved here; and the one that earned its own strange place in Broadway history after Danny Kaye’s onstage accident three months later—after the fall, so to speak.

    Let us concentrate first on the happier twin. No other show of the 1970-71 season had created as much anticipation as this contemporary reworking of the Genesis story of Noah, the ark and the flood. Rodgers had been away from Broadway since Do I Hear a Waltz? in 1965, Kaye since Let’s Face It in 1941-42. In lyricist Martin Charnin (who first brought the project to him), Rodgers had a new, young, talented collaborator. Peter Stone, fresh from his success with 1776, adapted The Flowering Peach, Clifford Odets’s last play. (It had been a hit on Broadway in 1954-55 with Menasha Skulnik as Noah.) Director Joe Layton had had a string of recent New York successes.

    Other actors, including Zero Mostel and Alan King, were also considered for the lead, but from the moment Danny Kaye made a commitment, Two by Two was very much his. Fifty-seven years old at its opening, Kaye ranked as one of America’s premier musical-comedy showmen, with a career covering theater (most notably Lady in the Dark with Gertrude Lawrence, which made him a star), films (including The Inspector General, The Court Jester, and White Christmas), and television—his CBS-TV variety series had recently concluded a four-year run. In the print advertising for Two by Two, his name towered above the title and arguably sold even more advance tickets than the name Richard Rodgers.

    At first, everything went fine. Here’s Rodgers on Kaye in The New York Times, about five months before opening: “All the artistry, humor and energy that is Danny Kaye is essential to the role of Noah.” He praised Kaye’s “great skill as an actor, and his compassion—his humanistic approach.” And here’s Kaye on Rodgers: “To work with Dick Rodgers, who is a giant, and writing so great, stimulated me” to take the role.

    They previewed in New Haven, then Boston, to generally good reviews. The show ran long, but so do a lot of musicals-in-progress. The abundant advance press coverage found Rodgers cheerful, energetic, and apparently recovered from his recent heart attack. Kaye was ebullient, full of stories, excited to be back in New York.

    The New York reviews were mixed, but in a way that sold tickets, praising Kaye and Rodgers. Clive Barnes in the Times found Kaye “so warm and lovable an entertainer, such a totally ingratiating actor, that for me at least he can do no wrong.” As for Rodgers, Barnes wrote, “this is not going to go down as his best musical score, but neither is it going down as his worst. He can still write a ballad better than anyone around, he had one number that sounds suspiciously like a protest song, and his comedy still has the old effervescence.”

    Richard Watts of the New York Post, in a similar vein: “Danny Kaye is altogether brilliant in the demanding part, making Two by Two worth seeing if only for his memorable performance… I doubt that this is one of Mr. Rodgers’ most brilliant scores, but there is no question of its attractiveness.”

    Less impressed were some critics, including John Lahr of the Village Voice (“…one of the saddest evenings I have ever spent in the theater… Mr. Kaye is as limp and uninteresting as any 600 year-old man would be”) and T. E. Kalem of Time (“…a jinxed musical, arch, vulgar, lumbering, stale… Richard Rodgers’s score is almost barren of melodic appeal”).

    For three months, Two by Two was a moderate hit, with every expectation of a moderately long run. Kaye had signed a one-year contract, and while the show probably would not have survived his departure, its creators might also have found another big Broadway name (why not Mostel or King?) to replace him.

    All such speculation went out the window at the February 5, 1971 performance, when Kaye tore ligaments in one ankle. Although he finished the show, he was then hospitalized for four days, emerging with a knee-length cast. Two by Two suspended performances while Rodgers and company assessed the damage.

    The next week, ads ran in New York newspapers announcing, “Danny Kaye will be back in the cast.” In yet another publicity bonanza, Kaye had decreed that the show would go on. His February 18 return—in a wheelchair; crutches would follow—commanded the front page of the Daily News. Ticket sales picked up again. What a trouper! What a show!

    What happened next may horrify playwrights and directors, but actors (especially those who know the feeling of being in the wrong play at the wrong time) may feel a certain cackling, id-driven glee. Clearly bored now with the show and working in some pain, Danny Kaye used his triumphant return to Two by Two as an excuse to transform the musical into his own vaudeville act.

    Exhibit A, from After Dark magazine: “…His performance is now a series of shtick, business, pretending to forget lines, talking to the audience, mimicking his fellow actors, trying to break them up and making a perfect ass of himself. During a recent performance, he had an onstage outburst where he vocally swore at a cast member—the audience let out a gasp and the actors finished the show in what reportedly was a state of shock.”

    Exhibit B, from the letters column of the Times, April 10, 1971: “…He used his wheelchair, his crutches and his encased leg to terrorize the cast into ‘breaking up’ at every available opportunity… He regaled us by throwing lines at [television personality] Dick Cavett (seated in the audience)… With the single exception of the actor who played the youngest son (who absolutely refused to get out of character), the others at times could barely read their lines audibly, far less limn a decent role.”

    Kaye remained sanguine, telling Variety, “Since I hurt my leg and was forcibly immobilized, we have been forced to change it into an entertainment… People like it better than they did before—I can tell by the audience reaction and what people say.” And Rodgers, perhaps through his teeth: “I have no objections. The people seem to like the show as it is, and tickets are being sold.”

    In his autobiography, Musical Stages, Rodgers was not so charitable, chiding Kaye for being “apparently unable to submit to the discipline of the theater”…: “What was especially disturbing was that there was nothing I or anyone else could do about all of this; Danny simply could not take criticism. The minute someone faulted him, he’d just sulk and slow down, and figuring that slowing down was worse than cutting up, we reluctantly said nothing.”

    How much Richard Rodgers enjoyed the summer of 1971 is yours to estimate. By the end of Kaye’s tenure in September, there was no more talk about new Noahs, and the show went quietly into history.

    After so much on- and offstage ado, this original-cast recording, sans wheelchair, with everyone playing it straight, makes a peculiar monument to the show, but at least it focuses attention where it belongs, on Rodgers and Charnin, on Kaye, and on their talented supporting cast.

    Two by Two paid off its backers, with a little profit. Rodgers would write two more musicals, Rex and I Remember Mama, neither as successful as this. Charnin, Stone, and Layton all went on to numerous better things. Among the cast, Madeline Kahn has had the most noteworthy career (On the Twentieth Century on stage, and those hilarious Mel Brooks roles on screen). Danny Kaye never came back to Broadway.

    Perhaps by divine providence, Two by Two survives less as a show than as a score, and even Danny Kaye might have preferred it that way. At its best, and here on this recording, the show thoughtfully balances the painful little dramas of an ordinary family against the terrifying, unanswerable questions of existence that face biblical chicken farmers and middle-class Broadway theater audiences alike. And if some of us choose to deal with those questions by throwing out the script and resurrecting vaudeville, perhaps the rest of us can find it in our hearts to forgive.

(Synopsis omitted.  Check your Bible.)

 

DEAR WORLD

 (Notes for CD reissue of original Broadway cast album.  Copyright Sony Music Entertainment Inc.)

    Let us now praise intriguing failures, those Broadway musicals that do not really connect with critics or public but nonetheless linger in the mind, whether for a fine performance here, a memorable song there, or simply a willingness to try something different.

    In the glory days of the original-cast album, when virtually every musical was recorded, those LPs preserved the memory and fueled the cult. Today, when musicals are almost never recorded until they’re proven hits—if then—the non-hits vanish instantly, leaving behind only the ashes of burned reviews and the accountants; and we must rely on word-of-mouth among the faithful and wait (and wait) for revivals.

    Dear World, fortunately, falls into the former category. For more than two decades, the Columbia original-cast album has added to the admirers of this Jerry Herman/Jerome Lawrence/Robert E. Lee adaptation of Jean Giraudoux’s The Madwoman of Chaillot. Much of the appeal, of course, comes from Angela Lansbury singing new Jerry Herman songs (for which she won her second Tony award) right after her legend-making performance in Mame. But for those of us who did not see the original, the combination of the album, Charles Burr’s synopsis on the back cover, and our imaginations have been our only clues to the rest of Dear World. What might it have been? What went wrong?

    Certainly the play itself has not lost its charm. The Maurice Valency translation/adaptation of La Folle de Chaillot continues to attract American school, college and repertory theater groups well into its fourth decade. If anything, the story—a wise, semi-supernatural old woman saves the Earth from greedy oil barons while sheltering a pair of young lovers—becomes more contemporary with each passing year, still beckoning to youthful romance and idealism as the need to save our fragile planet takes on greater and greater urgency. Considering that Giraudoux’s “ecology” play premiered in France as long ago as 1945, his knack for precognition must be ranked with Jules Verne’s.

    One of those college productions, at the University of Miami in the 1950s, featured, in the difficult role of the Deaf Mute, a young non-actor named Jerry Herman. “At the time I did not understand why a drama student who wanted to become a composer had to act in a play, and light a play, and so forth,” Herman recalled recently. “But those were the requirements for a degree, and I have come to realize how brilliant that was—it does give you the other side of things. And of course I fell in love with the play. It was an enormously exciting experience just to feel the Giraudoux dialogue, to be in a play that had something really relevant to say. His way of having one woman save the world—I thought it was a wonderful allegory.”

    Herman finished school, came to New York to begin his career, and “sort of forgot about” The Madwoman of Chaillot. Of course, he had some sizable distractions: a series of off-Broadway musicals (I Feel Wonderful, Nightcap, Parade), followed by three successive Broadway hits, Milk and Honey, Hello, Dolly! and Mame. On the last, his collaborators were Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, also the authors of the long-running stage adaptation of the Patrick Dennis novel Auntie Mame.

    With Hello, Dolly! and Mame simultaneously packing them in on Broadway, Herman had reached a pinnacle of success and a turning point of sorts. One night, he found himself at home going through some old photographs. “And there was a picture of me in The Madwoman of Chaillot,” he remembers. “And I thought, I’ve done the glamorous, extremely commercial musical, and if I ever had a chance to do something different, something I wanted to do because it really had something to say, this would be a good time.”

    First, he approached the producers Alexander Cohen and Hildy Parks, who loved the idea and agreed to take on the project. Then, almost automatically, he went back to Lawrence and Lee, who “had become like my brothers” during Mame, and they, too, signed on.

    From those first meetings, it seems to have been clear to everyone that this was no easy show. “We all knew that we did not have the potential for a huge commercial piece,” Herman says. “But we all felt the same way: that a career in the theater should not just go from commercial success to commercial success. There are times when you should just do something you love and believe in. It’s healthy to approach your career that way. We set out to create a musical that would please us, and I must say, it truly, truly did—and does. I’m very proud of it.”

    For the crucial role of the Madwoman, they of course approached Angela Lansbury, who had then just left Mame. “I never thought she would say yes,” Herman recalls, “because she had become the glamour queen of Broadway, but as you can see from the rest of her brilliant career, Angela is a lady who likes to try everything—just as we were doing—and she loved the challenge of doing something that was not another Mame, that was not what audiences now saw her as. She just saw it as a great acting experience, and she was right.”

    As much of a change as Dear World presented for Angela Lansbury, it proved even more of a stretch for Jerry Herman. This is plainly, recognizably, a Jerry Herman score, full of his signature melodic and lyrical hooks, but he is also trying to reach beyond himself here. The mad tea party scene that is the high point of the second act, for example, finds him hip-deep in triple counterpoint, capturing the funny, deluded, yet rigorously logical world of three crazy ladies and venturing as far into Sondheim country as he has ever gone.

    But as Hamlet once remarked to Irving Berlin, enterprises of great pitch and moment have a way of losing the name of action, often in Philadelphia. Well before Dear World came to Broadway, the creative team saw that they were not getting across to their audiences. From its first performance, the show seemed to provoke a disturbingly wide range of reactions. By the time they had commenced what would at that time be a record number of Broadway previews (57—Nick and Nora students take note), they were on their third director. Sometimes “problem” shows can heal themselves, but the recovery rate isn’t encouraging; Dear World went through so many operations that by the night it finally opened, February 6, 1969, the patient had become hard to recognize.

    The New York critics were mostly merciless, so we will be mercifully brief. Clive Barnes, New York Times: “For most of the time [Dear World] stubbornly refuses to get off the ground, except when it is gracefully flounced up airborne by a delicate kick from the adorable Miss Lansbury, who not only can make magic out of nothing but has to… The Lawrence and Lee book has a well-worn air to it, as if it had been rewritten more times than Soviet history and probably cannot quite believe that it is still there.”

    Jack Kroll, Newsweek: “The whole thing just vibrates in its own syrup like a huge bowl of tasteless gelatin.” Time: “… a smoldering rubble of tedium…” What praise there was went almost entirely to Angela Lansbury, whom Barnes called “a minor miracle.” “No connoisseur of musical comedy can afford to miss Miss Lansbury’s performance,” he went on. “She could be a Beardsley Salomé 40-years-on, there is wild poetry in every mincingly genteel gesture. Her dancing is exquisite, she moves like a camp vision of Bernhardt, and her acting and singing perfectly express a character seen in precise musical comedy terms.”

    The only other performer consistently singled out by the critics was Miguel Godreau, who played—ironically enough—the Deaf Mute. For obvious reasons, none of that performance survives here. Dear World itself survived for about four months (helped not at all by a $12.50 top ticket price that was then the highest on Broadway) before the backers—chief among them Columbia Records—went home to bathe.

    Where did Dear World go wrong? “It’s a very fragile show,” Jerry Herman says. “We were true to the play, which is a very fragile play.” And therein may lie much of the answer. The Madwoman of Chaillot belongs to a school of French drama and cinema that may be described as fables-for-adults, which depend for their effects on a precarious blend of irony and sentiment and a very light touch. When they succeed, as in the films of Jean Renoir and the Giraudoux Madwoman and the film King of Hearts, they seem to speak universal truths in a universal language. When they don’t, they seem either annoyingly, cloyingly coy (the Broadway version of King of Hearts comes to mind) or simply incomprehensible, at least to foreigners (the Louis Malle film of Zazi dans le Métro; as they say in France, you had to be there).

    To be fair to Herman and Lawrence and Lee, in that same year of 1969, an English language film of Madwoman, directed by Bryan Forbes and starring Katharine Hepburn, Charles Boyer, Edith Evans, Danny Kaye and on and on, also failed to recapture the charm of the play and quickly vanished. And based on the comments of the Dear World reviewers, even the original play has worn out its welcome with some audiences. To find a wholly successful American production, you might have to go back to the 1948 Broadway original with Martita Hunt and John Carradine, which is not exactly available on video.

    Here, at least, you can begin to form your own opinion. Based on this recording alone, expertly produced by Thomas Z. Shepard in the midst of his late-’60s hot streak, this belated reviewer is inclined to agree with Brendan Gill of The New Yorker, who found, after all the rumors and all the build-up, that “the actual show is quite a pleasant one, and Angela Lansbury’s performance in the leading role is an authentic triumph.” With thanks to Charles Burr’s original notes, welcome in:

 

    The story, simple to the point of being childlike, is a modern-day clash of Good and Evil. Perhaps each of us has secretly believed that our grandmothers were good witches who could save us from the devil. The devil here has been incarnated, collectively, as the largest corporation in the world, whose board of directors learns, from a sleazy prospector, that it can turn millions into billions by drilling for oil under the streets of Paris. Bistros, boulevards, Arc de Triomphe, Jerry Lewis film festivals—tear them all down and bring in the derricks, and by THE SPRING OF NEXT YEAR, the “Establishment” joyously sings, money and pollution will reign.

    Their only clue to the source of the oil, however, is the water from a café, the Café Francis, in the Chaillot district. The café is not for sale. An accident is arranged. Dispatched as saboteur is the unlikely Julian (Kurt Peterson), a nice young man who has had some legal troubles, been bailed out by the Chairman of the Board, and is now in no position to refuse the dirty job. He will plant a bomb, to explode at noon.

    But the Café Francis, we now see, is infinitely worth saving. Its intimates include Nina (Pamela Hall), a pretty waitress; a Deaf Mute who mimes and dances; a handsome waiter; a skillful juggler; an endearing prostitute… and, as resident Good Witch, an ancient madwoman who calls herself the Countess Aurelia (Angela Lansbury). Her mission in life is to feed the stray cats of Paris, which she does with scraps, bones and chicken parts collected daily at the café. She is also in perpetual search of a missing, nine-foot feather boa, a gift from a vanished (imaginary?) lover.

    Noon arrives, suspensefully, and passes, with no explosion. Enter the Deaf Mute with Julian, whom he has prevented from jumping off a bridge. In the process, Julian has knocked himself out cold. Nina comforts him, brings him around; he sees her and thinks he is in paradise; the Countess knows love when she sees it.

    Julian now confesses his mission. Having failed to carry it out, he sees himself as doomed and again wants to end it all, but the Countess will not hear of it. Despair is a creature of the darkness, she says; hope springs again EACH TOMORROW MORNING. Reassured, Julian decides to stay, but is immediately caught by the corporation, only to be rescued by the Countess, who runs the Chairman off the premises. He goes, swearing to destroy her and the café.

    The Countess’s friends see the seriousness of the situation, but the Countess’s tenuous grip on reality will not permit her to see the evil in the world. If what they say is true, she says, I DON’T WANT TO KNOW. She retreats into the sewers of Paris, leaving Julian to hide out in her tiny apartment under the café.

    Nina, left alone, now admits to us that she has been with many men before, but has never given her heart (I NEVER SAID I LOVE YOU). The Countess, meanwhile, has sought out her own guru manqué, a Sewerman (Milo O’Shea) who poles a barge full of refuse through the underground canals. Has the world indeed become an evil place, she asks him, and he must admit it: the proof is right there on his boat (GARBAGE).

    They are joined for a luncheon al…fresco? by two other dowager loonies: Constance, the Madwoman of the Flea Market (Carmen Mathews), who is deaf except on Wednesdays; and Gabrielle, the Madwoman of Montmartre (Jane Connell), who has an invisible dog and the long blonde curls of the little girl she hasn’t been for half a century. The world, all now agree, is truly sick, the evidence multiplying all around us—and only mad can clearly see it. DEAR WORLD, sings the Countess, wake up. Get well. Curtain.

    Act Two opens in the Countess’s apartment, where Julian is still hiding. Nina brings him a veal chop, but the Countess believes more than food is needed: KISS HER NOW. As they go off together, the Sewerman returns. Long ago, the Countess saved his life, and in return he has promised to show her, when needed, the great secret of the Moving Stone. Now he demonstrates: turn the head of a particular stone gargoyle, and a secret trap door opens. Beneath is a series of steps that go down and down. Only down. Forever.

    He goes, and the Countess ponders: if you could gather all the bad people in the world and just dispose of them… would it be legal? This becomes the topic of a singular tea party consisting of the three madwomen and their various attendant spirits, but with this group it is hard to stay on the subject. Constance wanders off into the land of old lovers (MEMORY). Gabrielle and the Countess decide that memories are like fake jewelry: the longer you wear them, the realer they become (PEARLS). Gabrielle is distracted by her imaginary dog (DICKIE), then informs them she didn’t bring him today. Constance wishes for the guidance of her household VOICES—teapot, vacuum cleaner, hot water bottle—but the Countess tells her that everything, past and present, is available to them right there, unseen in the air (THOUGHTS). The party concludes in mad counterpoint.

    The evil people are guilty, the madwomen decide, so there must be a trial. They will meet at midnight at the Flea Market. The Countess has Julian dictate a letter to the Chairman that she will do as he wishes if he and all his group will come to the Flea Market at fifteen minutes past.

    As the Countess naps, her plans in place, Julian busies himself around the apartment… and finds the missing feather boa. As he presents it to the half-awake Countess, she imagines he is her lover, Adolphe, she is 25 again… AND I WAS BEAUTIFUL. (“I don’t think I’ve ever written a song I’m more fond of,” Herman says. “It has a simplicity that I really strive for in my work. Everything is exactly where it should be, and it gives me great pleasure to hear it.”)

    Julian, on his way to deliver the letter, is caught in the rain, and reflects on the changes in his life (Reprise: EACH TOMORROW MORNING). That night, at the Flea Market, the trial is held with the Sewerman and his friends in place of the Establishment. They plead their case but are found guilty, and the Countess must put her plan into action, all alone, ONE PERSON.

    The members of the Establishment arrive, with what seems to be a deal to save the café and makes its habitués rich. The Countess is not fooled. She leads them all to her cellar, pulls on the gargoyle, opens the secret trap door, and down they all go. The world has been saved, at least for the moment. Dawn breaks, birds sing, and the Countess goes on about her business, feeding the strays (FINALE/REPRISES). And that is—was—that.

    Or is it? At this writing, at the end of 1991, Messrs. Herman, Lawrence and Lee have completed a substantial overhaul of Dear World, making the book shorter and clearer, reinstating two songs that were cut out of town, and with almost a quarter-century’s distance, harmonizing what had come to feel overworked. They are negotiating for a revival. The planet remains in desperate need of rescue. The timing of this re-issued original cast album is both felicitous and utterly accidental—just the way the Countess would want it. Perhaps, for Dear World, the stairs lead not only down but up.

 (2009:  Still waiting.)