My new book 'Lost in the Dark: A World History of Horror Film' is now available!

In addition to my ongoing projects, I completed and sold a non-fiction narrative about the history of the horror film around the world. You can read all about it here: https://www.filmpatrol.com/2021/09/how-to-write-film-history-book.html . 

The NRR Project #52: The first laugh track; or, why is comedy funny?

The OKeh laughing record

Recorded 1920, Berlin

Released in U.S. in 1922

Performers: Lucie Bernardo, Otto Rathke, and Felix Silbers

2:20

"Comedy is the salt of civilization, its critical voice. The comic spirit is forgiving, stands up for freedom and elasticity, and counters the corrosive powers of evil by refusing to acknowledge its claims over the human spirit. Its real enemy is custom drained of significance; it is the ability of life to assert its claims no matter what social forms dictate." — Guy Davenport

OK, I’m not going to kid you. The best and most comprehensive take on this interesting novelty recording is the analysis and history written by Casey O’Dell for the National Recording Registry, which you can access here. All the vital facts are there, and anything I might add would only be commentary.

Which has never stopped me before.

Boiled down, the facts are these: the original recording is from Germany, recorded on the OKeh label in 1920 — which itself ripped off the idea from Henry Klausen’s recording “The Misfortunes of Youth” in 1903. On the Laughing Record (in German, Das Original Lach Aufnahme), a cornetist tries gamely to play a serious solo, only to be undermined by a giggling, then guffawing, woman. A man joins in the audible hilarity, flummoxing the instrumentalist. At about the two-minute mark, the two laughers finally settle down for a moment, and the horn player makes another game effort. However, this triggers an even more raucous burst of laughter, including snorts, gasps, and sighs, until the comic convulsions peter out.

That’s it. It sold more than a million copies in America. Soon and often copied by other labels around the world, the recording and its like popped up again and again.

O’Dell expertly traces the recording’s history and heritage. He rightly adjudges the subjective experience of listening to the recording as hovering between the “joyous” and “demonic.” O’Dell makes the case for it being a precursor of the laugh track, and talks about our enjoyment of the forbidden and unprofessional live crack-ups of stage and film (or “breaking,” or as the British say, “corpsing”).

He even cites the recording as a proto-meme, and he’s right in the sense that the piece transcends language, making it universally comprehensible and contributing powerfully to its analog-era virality. It’s a great piece of insight.

To it, I can only add some basic thoughts about comedy. Now: nobody wants to talk about why something is funny. Trust me. In my Film Comedy class at NYU, I was forced to read Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Subconscious. Not only wasn’t it compelling reading, but there were no jokes worth cribbing from it. Analysis is death to comedy, which, like horror and erotica, short-circuits a rational response for a welcome burst of feeling, and unmediated response. (To complicate things, we must factor in scholar Eric Griffiths’ statement, “It is important to remember that laughter can express other emotions apart from amusement.”)

Now, Freud thought that comedy provided psychic relief, that it is a safety valve that allows the expression of repressed, forbidden, or social unacceptable ideas. This is also known as the “Hey, I was just kidding” theory, and the reason why comics and satirists are usually the first to be silenced when dictatorships rise.

The ancients proposed that laughter was a way of feeling superior (anyone who has watched the Three Stooges has been exposed to this theory). For them, the clown doing what was “wrong” was a way of reinforcing what society deemed to be “right,” and reinforced adherence to normative values. The incongruous juxtaposition theory, which would also be a great name for an EDM outfit, simply states that humor is triggered when something is out of place or context, or contravenes normal understanding. Surrealist humor such as Magritte’s The Treachery of Images (1929) illustrates the theory aptly.

A more recent and more compelling idea has evolved about comedy, to do with the subversion of compassion. The philosopher Henri Bergson declared that laughter required the elevation of the intellect over the sensibilities — that it puts us at a remove that allows us to laugh. We laugh at things that, if presented seriously, would trigger a compassionate response. As Mel Brooks put it, “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.” Thinking of it in this way, comedy takes on tones of sadism.

From a practical standpoint, the perspective of 15 years on stage as a comic taught me that comedy is fueled by a great deal of aggression, sparked by a real grievance about the gap between things as they should be and things as they are. There is an immense pleasure in sublimating this impulse to the service of provoking laughter, and it promotes (temporarily at least) a sense of power and control over the vagaries of human life, a way of both naming what infuriates us and conquering it by laughing at it.

Bergson writes that laughter is inherently complicit; “laugh and the world laughs with you,” as the saying goes. There is an element of coercion to this, but also a spur to inclusivity. After all, if we’re in on the joke, our position is privileged. We become, literally, the cognoscenti, people who know.

The Laughing Record works because it goads us into laughing as well. It gives us a scenario in which we can side with anyone we hear. A musician is attempting to play something straight — to celebrate staying within the boundaries of taste, and the socially acceptable idea of what constitutes entertainment. To the extent that any of us has had to stand up in front of others and perform, our sympathies fly to the struggling cornetist. However, as audience members who have had to sit through insufferable cultural experiences, we side with the laughers as well. Who hasn’t wanted to crack up themselves in such solemn intolerable moments?

There’s no resolution in the recording, no narrative save that which the listener brings to it. Near its end, the cornetist tries to get started again, but he can only blat out a couple of notes, struggling not to laugh himself. And the sense The Laughing Record gives is, that’s OK. Laughter is the solvent of pretension.

The National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Up next: “Ory’s Creole Trombone.”)

The NRR Project #50: Original country: ‘Arkansas Traveler’/‘Sallie Gooden’

Eck Robertson

‘Arkansas Traveler’

Recorded June 30, 1922

Music and lyrics attributed to Col. Sanford Faulkner

Performed by Eck Robertson and Henry Gilliland

3:03

‘Sallie Gooden’

Recorded July 1, 1922

Folk tune

Performed by Eck Robertson

3:10

Where do folk songs come from? “No one knows, that’s why they’re folk songs.” Yes, I know. However, we cultural spelunkers like the opportunity to clamber deep inside the history of a song or melody and attempt to trace it back as far as we can. Hey ho!

First things first, though. These are considered to be the first recorded country songs (they would be classified as “hillbilly songs” for some time; country music was niche music until the singing cowboys of screen and radio brought into the popular culture), and Alexander Campbell “Eck” Robertson (1887-1975) couldn’t have been picked more deliberately to represent the development of traditional music.

He was born and grew up on a farm in the Texas panhandle, on the flat, treeless plains of Llano Estacado. His grandfather was a competitive fiddler, as were his father and uncles. By the time Eck was 16, he was making a living as a musician. Eck traveled with medicine shows, performed in silent movie theaters, played at fiddling contests. He worked up a routine of patter and jokes, and fancy tricks, even coaxing speech sounds out of the instrument with the aid of a metal contact.

He and fellow fiddler and Civil War vet Henry C. Gilliland went to New York, auditioned for the Victor Talking Machine Company, and recorded a few tunes. Robertson would record sporadically after that, but it wasn’t until he was rediscovered during the urban folk boom of the early 1960s that he was finally given some of the recognition and honor he deserved.

Robertson’s virtuosic technique is evident on both recordings; in “Arkansas Traveler” he plays the high harmony to Gilliland’s melody, and in “Sally Gooden,” he whips off the melody and a dozen variations with seeming effortlessness and inventiveness, crashing along at a headstrong pace, underlining all with a compelling, droning ground note. This is dance music, social music, but there is a sense of pride and professionalism as well. Robertson and Gilliland weren’t happened upon in the fields by a Lomax. Music was their business, and in this way music that could almost be defined as tribal moved out into the light and started mutating in response to commercial pressures, technological considerations, and popular taste.

Unlike many American folk tunes, “The Arkansas Traveler” comes with some documentation. It came to life as a result of a real-life encounter (or least the embellished superstructure of one). Col. Sanford C. “Sandy” Faulkner (1803-1874) was a prominent cotton planter in Chicot County, Arkansas. In the 1840, he campaigned with some friendly politicians, canvassing the hinterlands of the districts for votes. The party of five men got lost in the backwoods of the Boston Mountains, located on the Ozark Plateau in the northwest portion of the state.

They came upon the cabin of a squatter, and Faulkner was nominated to ask directions. The exchange, accompanied by a two-part melody, became a favorite story that Faulkner performed at dinners and functions, until it jumped and spread by word of mouth. Eventually, it was written down; the complete original text can be read here at Historic Arkansas. The gist of the story that the traveler is thwarted time and time again in his attempts to find out where he is, how he can get where he needs to go, whether he and his friends can find food and shelter, or even to establish some kind of communication.

Over and over again, the squatter shoots the traveler down with sarcastic wit. “Does this road go all the way to Little Rock?” “It ain’t gone nowhere yet.” “Have you lived here all your life?” “Not yet.” “You’re not very smart, are you?” “No. But I ain’t lost.” Each squatter response is punctuated with the repetitive sawing of the signature phrase on his fiddle. (All former children will recognize the tune as carrying the later lyrics, “Pickin’ up a baby bumblebee/Won’t my mommy be so proud of me!” etc.)

Finally the traveler says, “Why don’t you play the rest of that tune?” Squatter says, “I don’t know it.” The traveler takes the fiddle and completes the song with a flourish . . . and suddenly the squatter knows how to get to Little Rock, and has room for the strangers, and plenty of food, and a bit of whiskey as well.

Washburn's 1858 painting, The Arkansas Traveler

The story is solid and well-crafted, punctuated with a string of jokes funny in themselves before the big payoff, musically and comedically. The conflict between the “civilized” person and the simple-acting-but-sly country bumpkin is ancient and easily understood. In 1858, Edward Washburn created a painting depicting the story; it became popular by virtue of being reproduced as an inexpensive Currier & Ives lithograph. It became a vaudeville sketch in 1869, and played on national stages for 20 years. Charles Ives incorporated the tune into his Country Band March (1905), skewering it in the process. Since then, the song has been covered countless times, most notably by Pete Seeger on Frontier Ballads (1954) and Jerry Garcia and David Grisman on Not for Kids Only (1993).

“Sallie Gooden” has a more ambiguous origin story. It can be searched for under a number of variant names — Sally, Sallie, Goodin, Gooden, Goodwin, Godwin. The tune is a simple reel, the kind played at dances or “play-parties,” the latter being social events for teens in pre-technology days. The titular heroine is the object of both affection and teasing — “Had a piece of pie, had a piece of puddin’/Gave ‘em both away just to see Sally Goodin”; “Sally is my darlin’, Sally is my daisy/When she says she hates me, I think I’m going crazy”, and on and on, with hundreds of improvised couplets that can be tacked on as long as breath lasts. It is said that the original Sally Goodin ran a beloved boarding house on the Big Sandy River in Kentucky during the Civil War, and was commemorated by Confederate soldiers stationed there.

Under the words is the melody, which swings brightly and merrily in a major mode, a simple seesaw that’s easy to learn and build on. Peel back further and you’ll find a darker, quieter source for the song. Before “Sallie Gooden” had lyrics, it was known as “Boatin’ Up Sandy,” when the river was the quickest and easiest path to take north to Ohio, and bore the bulk of commercial trade in the region. “Sandy” is housed in the minor key, a shambling and melancholy piece that aches with loneliness. Leave it to humankind’s natural inclination to leaven such sentiments with humor and energy, transforming a haunting tune into something more upbeat and memorable.

The National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Up next: ‘The Boys of the Lough/The Humours of Ennistymon.’

Pop-era: Best opera parodies on film

Eddra Gale as Frau Fassbender in What's New, Pussycat?

OK, freaks – I mean, folks. To be an opera lover means having an excellent sense of humor about the whole thing. For every sincere aficionado of music drama, there is a horde of unbelievers who flinch at the sound of an aria, and which equates opera with a refined and expensive form of torture.

That’s not to say that opera doesn’t deserve a little elbow to the diaphragm at times. As a high-risk, complex, expensive synthesis of several arts forms, it’s tough to produce well . . . and like the girl with the curl, when it’s bad, it’s horrid. It’s also been typed as an affectation of the rich – which makes disdaining its challenges a populist nose-thumbing delight.

And why not? The proposition of a sung story enacted is on its face absurd – it takes time to get used to the conventions and suspend your disbelief as never before. Opera neither requires nor desires internal logic, verisimilitude, or even believability. We need the plot to hurry up and get the hell out of the way so we can go completely, decadently emotional. Don’t you feel a little silly sometimes? Honestly?

When you do, put a few of these on. Get it out of your system.

The list of audio-only operatic prankings is long, beginning as early as vaudeville, judging by Cal Stewart's Uncle Josh character in the "Opera at Punkin Center" recording of 1909, and Willie and Eugene Howard’s “After the Opera” sketch, first recorded in 1925. It’s also worth mentioning and diving into the long and hilarious discographies of Anna Russell, Spike Jones and His City Slickers, Tom Lehrer, Victor Borge, and Peter Schickele for a start.

For Wagnerians, Charles Ludlam’s 1977 stage sendup Der Ring Gott Fablonjet is a priceless read, but a staging much less a recording is not on the horizon (though I’d love to). The cliche of the helmeted diva has been around almost since the Ring cycle was first performed, certainly because it’s easy and fun to mock. It can be found scattered across modern culture and media, morphing to fit the needs of ‘60s absurdism in Clive Donner’s 1965 What’s New, Pussycat? as well as the avant-garde sci-fi conceits of Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element in 1997, when he hands ‘Il dolce suono mi colpi di sua voce’ from Lucia di Lammermoor to the giant blue Diva Plavalaguna.

So, here’s a nice selection of comic cadenzas from film and TV, ranging from the innocent and playful to the dark and NSFW.

A Night at the Opera/Dir: Sam Wood, Edmund Goulding/1935

Of course. The sendup of all things pompous in the opera world, culminating with Il Trovatore here, is merciless, a template for all future comic-disaster sequences in film.

Our Gang Follies of 1938/Dir: Gordon Douglas/1937

Alfalfa is “King of Crooners,” but he wants to be an opera star! “I’m the Barber of Seville, Figaro, Figaro!” he sings. Everyone hates him, and he ends up singing in the gutter as the snow cascades arund him. He relents. “I wanna croon!” he admits, before waking from his cautionary dream. Opera is clearly a ticket to the bottom.

Wonder Man/Dir: H. Bruce Humberstone/1945

Danny Kaye plays twins, one a shy scholar and the other a wacky nightclub entertainer. The comic witnesses a murder, gets killed himself, then inhabits his twin’s body as needed to solve said crime . . . and provide typical Danny Kaye bits. With me so far? At the climax, he must interweave testimony with an operatic duet.

Micro-Phonies/ Dir: Edward Bernds/1945

Squareheads of the Round Table/ Dir: Edward Bernds/1948

There are only two kinds of people in this world, so if you don’t like the Three Stooges, let your gaze lightly vault over this obnoxious entry. There now, for the rest of us what could be more fun than Curly impersonating the not-so-ravishing Senorita Cucaracha? The butchering of the Sextet from Lucia di Lammermoor would be repeated with variation three years later in Squareheads.

Willie as Pagliacci.

The Whale Who Wanted to Sing at the Met AKA Willie the Operatic Whale/Dir: Clyde Geronimi, Hamilton Luske/from Make Mine Music, 1946

This is the 10^th and final sequence from the 1946 Disney anthology film Make Mine Music, one of a string of six short-subject collections the studio put out during the 1940s. This was in response to the loss of animators, and markets, to the war effort. This sequence is a wonderful little fantasy, with narration and voicings by Nelson Eddy (Disney uses multitrack recording here for one of the first times). It ends tragically, in line with operatic tradition – and I personally mark it as another soul-crushing moment in a long life of Disney-inspired trauma.

Show Business/Dir: Edward L. Marin/1945

If You Knew Susie/Dir: Gordon Douglas/1948

This takeoff on the Sextet from Lucia was first used in Show Business and repeated in Susie; Cantor and Davis had a comic affinity as well as an offscreen romance. Susie was Cantor’s last starring movie role.

Long-Haired Hare/Dir: Chuck Jones/1949

The Rabbit of Seville/Dir: Chuck Jones/1950

What’s Opera, Doc?/Dir. Chuck Jones/1957

Chuck Jones’ mastery of animated comedy was such that these are not only the funniest and most familiar opera parodies in our culture, but three of the best Bugs Bunny cartoons, period.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother/Dir: Gene Wilder/1975

I have no idea why Gene Wilder inserted a long parody of Un ballo in maschera here (it does forward the plot, much as in Wonder Man), but I’m awfully glad he did. Few actors could pull it off better than Dom DeLuise and Madeline Kahn. “Stop that, you’re such as tickle-tease/You know I’m super passionate . . .” Classic.

All the Great Operas in 10 Minutes/Dir: Kim Thompson/1992

It can be read either as a condemnation of opera’s bloody absurdities, or . . . no, actually, that’s the only way it can be read. However, the true aficionado will laugh wisely as the body count mounts.

The Abduction of Figaro/Dir: Peter Schickele/1998

Schickele’s comic alter ego P.D.Q. Bach has enjoyed recordings of his The Stoned Guest and A Little Nightmare Music previously, but The Abduction of Figaro is his “simply grand” masterpiece. Any opera that opens in “a town on the seacoast of Spain or Italy or somewhere” and includes the Dance of the Seven Pails is all right by me.

Television has played a lot with opera as well. The fastidious Felix Unger from The Odd Couple series was a notorious opera maven. Regular viewers of TV’s The Simpsons have been exposed to plenty of operatic put-downs. Sesame Street helped the operatic cause immensely by incorporating operatic visitors into its broadcasts, and performers such as Marilyn Horne and Samuel Ramey were happy to be silly for the sake of educating kids (not to mention the fabulous Placido Flamingo, the show’s muppet who sang for the Nestropolitan Opera!).

Here are some other highlights:

“Gallipacci”/”Caesar’s Hour”/Oct. 10, 1955, NBC

A worthy successor to the original Show of Shows, Caesar’s Hour had a great writing team and top-notch performers.

“The Producer”/”Gilligan’s Island”/Dir: George Cahan, Ida Lupino/Oct. 3, 1966

The most popular episode of the series guest-starred Phil Silvers as the scheming producer Harold Hecuba. The castaways perform a musical version of Hamlet, using tunes from Carmen and The Tales of Hoffmann (thank goodness someone brought records and a gramophone on that three-hour tour!).

“The O-U Song”/Written by Tom Lehrer, arranged by Joe Raposo/”The Electric Company” (1971-1977, PBS)

Tom Lehrer was a comedy sensation from 1953 through 1960. He left entertainment to pursue a distinguished career as a mathematics professor. Aside from a few pointed songs for the political satire show This Was the Week That Was and some nifty tunes, like this one, for educational TV.

“The Muppet Show”/Guest Beverly Sills/Nov. 8, 1979

Of course, Bubbles goes up against Miss Piggy in a mash-up of Traviata, Aida, and Wagner in something called, of course, Pigoletto.

“Kombat Opera Presents”/Created and composed by Richard Thomas/BBC, 2007

The most innovative and interesting use of opera in a non-opera context I’ve found. These five episodes, composed by Richard Thomas (Jerry Springer: The Opera) mock popular British TV shows of the time, contain very strong language and are NOT family-friendly or safe for work! However, they really leap forward in terms of marrying cinematic techniques to operatic structure . . . and are funny as hell.

Pop-era: modern songs lifted from operas – Part 2, The Interesting and Strange

Why? Why did these white doo-woppers cover four opera arias?

Here’s another project that’s snowballing into multiple parts, proving again that poking into obscure cultural corners is both a waste of one’s time and a provocation of delight.

In the first chapter of this investigation, I looked at hitsadapted from opera – “The Alabama Song,” “Mack the Knife,” “I Can’t HelpFalling in Love with You,” and “Stranger in Paradise.” In the commission of the first story, I found plenty of other examples of this syndrome. Here are 12. Interestingly, the bulk of these adaptations cropped up between the Big Band era and rock ‘n’ roll, when vocalists took center stage and “sweet singing” was the norm.

Some of these songs are sweet and some insufferable, but most, I think, are worth a listen by the curious opera fan.

“Avalon,” sung by Al Jolson, written by Vincent Rose, with additional credit taken by Jolson and Buddy De Sylva, 1920; AKA a transposed version of “E lucevan le stelle” from Tosca, Puccini, 1900

Here’s a case in which copping credit leads to downfall. Vincent Rose wrote the song, but it was common at the time for people with leverage to claim co-authorship of the song in order to gain a piece of its royalties. Jolson and De Sylva did. (The practice has stayed with us down the decades, unfortunately.) A year after the song emerged and became a hit, the publisher of composer Giacomo Puccini’s music sued, claiming that the song was based on the famous aria from Tosca, “E lucevan le stelle,” written 20 years before – only transposed from its original minor to a major key! They won the suit, and $25,000, and all future royalties from the song.

“Here,” sung by Tony Martin, written by Harold Grant, Dorcas Cochran, 1954; AKA “Caro nome” from Rigoletto, Verdi, 1851

This decent little ditty rose to #7 on the charts, and was later covered by the Four Belles, the late Jimmy Young, and Robert Goulet.

“Don’t You Know,” sung by Della Reese, composed by Bobby Worth, 1959; AKA “Quando me’n vo’” from La Boheme, Puccini, 1896

The song that made Della Reese’s career. The up-and-coming singer had already charted with “And That Reminds Me” two years previously, but “Don’t You Know” earned her a Grammy nomination and a long contract performing in Las Vegas. (Songwriter Bobby Worth also co-wrote “Tonight We Love,” which borrows a theme from Tchaikovsky.)

“Carmen’s Boogie,” arranged by George Cates, lyrics by Mel Leven, 1952; AKA “L’amour est un oiseau rebelle” from Carmen, Bizet, 1875 – Andrews Sisters, Spade Cooley (both 1952), the Crew Cuts (1955)

The Mambo and You,” composer unknown, year unknown (from 7” “The Crew Cuts Go To the Opera.” 1959); AKA “La donna e mobile” from Rigoletto, Verdi, 1851

“Need (aka The Urge),” composer unknown, year unknown (from 7” “The Crew Cuts Go To the Opera.” 1959); AKA the tenor line from “Bella figlia dell amore” quartet from Act 4 of Rigoletto, Verdi, 1851

“Mostly Martha,” written by Ralph Sterling, Dorcas Cochran, year unknown (from 7” “The Crew Cuts Go To the Opera.” 1959); AKA “M’appari” from von Flotow, Martha, 1847 (who lifted it from an opera he wrote a year earlier)

The Crew Cuts are universally despised by music historians, as part of the huge wave of square white artists and groups who Caucasian-ized the bejeezus out of R & B hits during the 1950s, in a misbegotten effort to “translate” and make safe the transgressive energy of that music for white kids (who all preferred the originals anyway). The Crew Cuts’ biggest hit was a cover of The Chords’ “Sh-Boom” (their cringeworthy version of “Susie Q” bears little comparison to Creedence Clearwater Revival’s definitive 1968 cover.)

Now, here’s the remarkable thing. Their “Carmen’s Boogie” was originally written for the Andrews Sisters, then covered by Spade Cooley, but the Crew Cuts’ version was a hit. Somehow, this microniche of singing pop covers of opera led to their 1959 7-inch, four-song mini-LP, The Crew Cuts Go to the Opera, where they stick it to Verdi and Flotow as well¹. The result is one of the oddest crossover pop-culture artifacts ever.

“Night,” sung by Jackie Wilson, lyrics by Johnny Lehmann, 1960; AKA “Mon coeur s’ouvre a ta voix” from Samson et Delila, Saint-Saens, 1877

Could this guy sing anything? It seems so. “Mr. Excitement” had a four-octave range, and killed it performing R&B, doo-wop, and pop. This very mayonnaise-ish take on “Mon coeur s’ouvre a ta voix” is a noble effort, and Wilson sells it hard. There’s enough strain in it, though, to make him an unlikely successor to Mario Lanza.

“Like I Do,” sung by Nancy Sinatra, written by Bob Manning, 1962; AKA The Dance of the Hours from La Gioconda, Ponichelli, 1876: also Maureen Evans, 1962; The Peanuts, as “Lemon No Kiss,” 1962; Theresa Brewer, as “She’ll Never, Never Love You,” 1963

These all predate the most famous reincarnation of the Dance of the Hours melody, listed just below, and probably helped trigger it. Four equally excruciating covers of this terrifyingly vapid adaptation must have crowded the airwaves of the time and inspired Allan Sherman. If you can get through them all, put a warm washcloth on your head and eat some ice cream.

“Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh (A Letter from Camp),” sung by Allan Sherman, written by Sherman and Lou Busch, 1963; AKA The Dance of the Hours from La Gioconda, Ponichelli, 1876

This song came out in August 1963, and was pretty much the last laugh America had before Kennedy’s assassination. Sherman’s fame was brief, and this was his big hit, but he inspired a few future satirists.

“Please Don’t Go,” sung by Donald Peers, arranged by Les Reed and Jackie Rae, 1969; AKA the Bacarolle from Les contes de Hoffmann, Offenbach, 1881

The trend of harnessing opera melodies to pop songs petered out in the 1960s. The few entries are lugubrious, if not lachrymose.

“And You Smiled,” sung by Matt Munro, composed by Trombey and Taggart, 1973; AKA “Eye Level” by the Simon Park Orchestra, 1972; AKA “Non piu andrai” from Le nozze di Figaro, Mozart, 1786

This is the trifecta, the hat trick of adaptations. “And You Smiled” has lyrics slapped on by Melvin David Taggart; its inspiration, “Eye Level,” was an instrumental hit performed by the Simon Park Orchestra, was the theme for a popular BBC-TV detective series Van der Valk. That theme, written by Jack Trombey, swipes the underpinnings of Mozart’s “Non piu andrai” and puts a new top line on it. A paradise of plagiaries (or, these days, should we say recycling?).

NEXT TIME: Best opera spoofs, audio and video

Note for #1: This was one of the 45-rpm records in my childhood home; we memorized it as kids and sang it constantly. In its own bizarre way, it may have been the gateway drug that led to my love of opera. The lyrics of “Carmen’s Boogie” are worth recounting here.

Hate the opera, it’s too highbrow

But there’s one number I can dig right now

Just like shifting without a clutch,

I ride the boogie with the Carmen touch

You ain’t livin’ if you have missed

The long-hair music with the Crew Cut twist

Don’t love often and don’t love much

But love that boogie with the Carmen touch

It rips up floors, it knocks down walls

They tell me it’s the reason that Niagara Falls

It even made Gibraltar rock

It’s not the kind of thing a mockingbird can mock

The day it hit in old Bombay

A Hindu couldn’t charm a snake away

They say in French, in Greek and Dutch

The boogie wasn’t boogie ‘til it got the Carmen touch!

I can’t reveal

The way I feel

I love so much

The Carmen touch

Knew a fellow, a cat named Red

Played fine piano but they shot him dead

Red deserved it, the such and such

He bluffed off boogie with the Carmen touch

What brings saucers around from Mars?

And what makes Masons keep their Mason jars?

What makes babies cry out so much?

They want their boogie with the Carmen touch

Pop-era: songs lifted from opera – Part 1, The Hits

Elvis getting ready to sing a song written in 1784.

“So many of the melodies of well-known popular songs were actually written by the Great Masters,” intones actor John Williams (best known as the “second Mr. French” on the sitcom Family Affair) in the long-running 1971 TV ad flogging a cut-rate Columbia House collection of classical excerpts, “120 Music Masterpieces.” He cited such tunes as “Our Love,” “Full Moon and Empty Arms,” and “Tonight We Love.” None of which are particularly remembered today.

What’s so bad about being popular? Nothing, nothing really. Opera is often derided for being antiquated, irrelevant, and economically inaccessible – but I notice a lot of it in car commercials. In fact, there are about a dozen arias that need time-outs right now¹.

Sometimes operas inspire reworkings. Rent is La Boheme, Elton John and Tim Rice wrote a new Aida in 1998, and a substantial part of the legacy of Andrew Lloyd Webber is recycled. Smokey Robinson’s lyrics for the 1970 hit “Tears of a Clown” mine the content of “Vesti la giubba,” but the music is original. Likewise, the standard “Poor Butterfly,” composed in 1916 by Raymond Hubbell and John Golden, outlines the plot of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, but doesn’t use its music save for a few bars in the instrumental bridge.

Few of the most familiar tunes from opera have been appropriated for modern songs. Of those few, fewer still ever cracked the charts. Here are four top pop-eratic numbers:

“Alabama Song,” Hauptmann/Weill, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, 1925/1930

 “(The Ballad of) Mack the Knife,” Brecht/Weill, AKA “Die Moritat von Mackie Messer,” The Threepenny Opera, 1928

The only opera songs to ever make the U.S. charts without substantial change were written by Kurt Weill, who could produce avant-garde work with one hand and pop hits (“September Song,” “Speak Low”) with the other. Elisabeth Hauptmann wrote the lyrics for “Alabama” for Bertolt Brecht, in English, in 1925; Brecht incorporated it into his Mahagonny five years later without crediting her. That the grim, sardonic lyrics appealed to post-WWII American listeners is surprising.

Both songs have accumulated lots of covers. The tragic and cynical “Alabama Song” received scorching interpretations by the Doors and David Bowie; the best version, very hard to find, is sung by Joe Frazier on the Chad Mitchell Trio’s 1964 Slightly Irreverent album.

The success of “Mack the Knife” is attributable to American composer Marc Blitzstein, who translated and staged Threepenny Opera in New York in 1954, a production which ran for years in the West Village. Weill’s wife Lottie Lenya covered it with Louis Armstrong in 1956, and so did many others. Bobby Darin’s 1959 hit version is modeled closely on Armstrong’s. The song is so popular it was hijacked for commercial purposes by McDonald’s in the 1980s.

“Can’t Help Falling in Love,” sung by Elvis Presley, written by Hugo Peretti, Luigi Creatore, George David Weiss, 1961; AKA “Plaisir d’amour,” Jean-Paul-Egide Martini, 1784

The tune (not from an opera, but by an operatic composer) is so appealing that it was covered by many artists before the King of Rock and Roll came along.

“Stranger in Paradise,” written by Robert Wright, George Forrest, 1953; AKA “The Gliding Dance of the Maidens” from the Polovtsian Dances, Prince Igor, Borodin, 1890

This song is from the hit 1953 musical Kismet, the songs of which are largely Borodin. Nonetheless, this song was a huge hit, covered most memorably by Tony Bennett – and even as a surf-rock instrumental by The Ventures, both as “The Stranger” and “Ten Seconds to Heaven.”

NEXT TIME: Al Jolson, Della Reese, Nancy Sinatra, Jackie Wilson . . . and the mystery of the Crew-Cuts

1.      FOOTNOTE: We need to give the following a rest – “Nessun dorma” from Turandot, “O mio babbino caro” from Gianni Schicchi, “La donne e mobile” from Rigoletto, “Un bel di” from Madama Butterfly, the Habanera AND the Toreador Song from Carmen, the Ride of the Valkyries from Die Valkyrie, the Anvil Chorus from Il Trovatore, “Vesti la giubba” from I pagliacci, “Voi che sapete” from Le nozze di Figaro, “Der Holle Rache” from Die Zauberflote, and the Flower Duet from Lakme. Of course, that they are easily remembered is all to the good – the goal is to be memorable, after all (if you’re scoring at home, Puccini wins with three mentions, and Verdi, Bizet, and Mozart tie for second). But we need to be strong and turn these off, go for the deep cuts.

Death to selfies

If you look at my banner photo on my Facebook page (that is, if you even go there anymore – isn’t FB for old and/or dead people?) you will see that it looks like a selfie. There’s my big old face dead center, scenic mountain backdrop, artful sunflare, and all.

Except I wasn’t trying to take my picture. I am technologically inept and was trying to take a picture of what was in front of me, in the other direction – a beautiful mountain panorama. Therefore, what you see is the most unpremeditated view of my face you are likely to get in this life.

Taking photographs was painful in the flashbulb and film days. We were always steered to “look into the light,” which resulted in many pictures of me cringing and clutching my face, albeit in good, solid lighting. I still have flash-flinch, and few photographers have captured me with my eyes open.

Now I bob amid selfie takers. The medium is the message. Everyone’s a star, and anything is permitted.

With the democratization of the media, everyone is now their own broadcaster and network. The gatekeepers have fallen. News and information can no longer be monetized, and in a capitalist society that means the communication apparatus is now for rent, with no public responsibilities (not that this hasn’t been always true to some extent). Initially liberating due to the ability of alternate voices to make themselves heard for the first time, the dissolution of the news industry means that there is no impetus to find out and tell the truth, to the best of one’s ability. And if truth is gone, all that remains is assertion.

Anti-intellectualism is on the rise. An overarching sense of being on the same page as a nation, no matter how awkwardly produced, is gone. Ironically, that consensual reality was a product of diversity. That mixture of opinion, fact, advertisements, propangadna, and as many viewpoints as could be crammed into a print publication at once forced the reader to be exposed to unfamiliar ideas, to be aware of other people’s problems, of trouble on the horizon. We self-select now. People do not want to know what’s going on (unless, seemingly, it’s upbeat stories about contemporary living for a savvy readership). We have ensiled ourselves.

We are almost post-literate. We quite literally express oursevles in images and video clips. We pose, we identify where we are, we say how we feel. We contextualize ourselves for our friends and followers, always foregrounded against a referent. We expel concussions of self-regard. We like things, we share things, we argue online, but it’s all little bush fires out on the grand savannah. That atomization of the media has fragmented the popular will, stunted its attention span. We are all chasing page views now, and anything goes, and goes by quickly.

We are exchanging the lasting for the ephemeral. The advent of “disposable” media services such as Snapchat means that the content vanishes after a time. With that the idea of generating something permanent is lost, and under that I find a fundamental, intolerable despair. It makes me fear that there are more people who think that there’s no reason to aim for something that lasts than there are otherwise. (Since I’ve taken it on myself to tell stories for a living, it’s of course in my own interest that I promote this concept. Have you Googled me lately? Online, in archives, my stuff’s still out there, and that’s the point.).

Instead of broadcasting to an unrestricted audience, the nature of social media is constricting us into a multitude of discrete sets of relationships – as numerous as cells in a beehive, each with a restricted, mediated point of view. With no new paradigm of consensual reality emerging, everyone is more easily entranced by their own illusions. Instead of the digital revolution pulling us all out together into the light, it has merely helped us build better bunkers.

So what’s the answer? Take otheries, I think. The obvious metaphor from my tale of my photograph, that I obtain the most accurate self-portrait when I focus outside myself, is trite, obvious, and ridiculously sentimental, even for me. But it is true.

When we turn the camera around, when we really look around us and transmit that, we’re on the right track back being human. All the old media can dry up and blow away, and the new ones can assume their rude shapes. The value in telling stories persist. We still need them. And when we tell them, we do wind up asserting ourselves in the most powerful fashion.

The NRR Project #21: ‘You’re A Grand Old Rag (Flag)’

A quick change of sheet music, in response to public demand.

“You’re a Grand Old Rag (Flag)”

Music and Lyrics: George M. Cohan

Singer: Billy Murray

Recorded Feb. 6, 1906

2:46

Brash is seemingly a word coined for George M. Cohan. The performer/playwright/songwriter/director/producer, who started his stage career at age 8, was one of the most popular and powerful figures in Broadway history. From 1904 through 1920, he staged more than 50 productions there – all but one successful. His songs such as “Yankee Doodle Dandy" and “Give My Regards to Broadway” are, justly, classics. Onstage, he epitomized a kind of cocky, hard-charging, quick-witted American persona that audiences responded to with devotion for decades.

“Americanism” was in the air. The country was finally waking up from self-absorption and internal development and was beginning to make its first expansionist stretches, jumping into jingoism with a will. Its industrial might was wowing the world. There was need for a vernacular expression of this energy and pride, akin to the already-popular marches of Sousa.

As a multiple talent, Cohan resembles impresario predecessors such as Dion Boucicault and David Belasco, as well as his contemporary Florenz Ziegfeld. Most of his plays are comic vehicles touched with sentiment, their plots driven by the confusions of romantic entanglements – early, important gropings toward the book musical.

“The Grand Old Rag,” as it was listed in the original program, was a generally despised title. No one wanted to hear the Stars and Stripes referred to in that way. The lyrics changed from “You’re a grand old rag/You’re a high-flying flag” to “You’re a grand old flag/Though you’re torn to a rag” to, finally, the redundant but unobjectionable “You’re a grand old flag/You’re a high-flying flag.” 

Unfortunately, the song had already been recorded. Popular tenor Billy Murray, the “Denver Nightingale” (he lived in the Mile High City from age 5 to 16) was another peppy, confident belter who could sell an upbeat song. It’s instructive to see that the song was recorded six days before the musical opened – marketing savvy is not as recent a development as we might think. (Murray wound up recording all three lyric variants.)

The words and music are patriotic hodgepodges, interpolating “Dixie,” “Auld Lang Syne,” “Marching through Georgia,” and Cohan’s own “Yankee Doodle Dandy” hit of two years previous. The result is a sensory overload of associations, delivered in an up-tempo rush that sweeps the listener along. We will run into Cohan again in a future installment, when we examine his classic of evangelical interventionism, 1917's "Over There."

The National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Up next: the Frances Densmore Chippewa/Ojibwe Cylinder Collection.

When the whirring stops: the death of the VCR

The ancient top-loader. Pure steampunk.

The Funai Electric Company of Japan makes its last Video Cassette Recorder, and the last one for the foreseeable future, in August. It’s over.

The first videocassette recording of a film was released in 1967. Starting in 1977, the Video Home System consumer-level analog recording tape was the film-industry standard. In 1997, the DVD began encroaching on the VHS tape’s territory. The last major-market film (and future trivia answer), “Eragon,” was released on VHS in 2007, and a year later, tape manufacture ceased entirely.

 Now whatever is left out there on magnetic video tape that is playable will be stuck in a world that’s rejected its playback technology. Like the V-disc, the 8-track tape, the player piano roll, the filmstrip, and the LaserDisc, it has dead-ended, become a sport in the genetic sense of the word. It’s a now-pointless mutation.

VHS tapes were essential to a very particular kind of understanding of film. Not since the advent of art houses and repertory cinemas on the American coasts in the late 1950s had such a stretch on unseen films been found, easily accessible in the open market.

We viewers were previously subject to the imperatives of the market. In childhood, there were a few enthusiasts who wrangled 16-millimeter films, but these were few and far between, and well-off. We could find some of the output of the famous Blackhawk Films on 8-millimeter and Super 8 (Super 8!) at the local libraries, and we owned an old 8-millimeter job that played our family home movies, and Blackhawks of Chaplin, Abbott and Costello, and Tarzan.

Otherwise, first-run films came and went, and if they were good but not popular, you might never see them again. Broadcast television, the first great secondary market, was a yawning abyss of hours to be filled, and old movies filled them. “The Wizard of Oz” played every Easter, Christmas movies at Christmas, etc. We used to go through the pre-cable TV guides every Sunday and underline and/or circle (no highlighters yet) upcoming obscure gems, making late-night appointments to stare bloody-eyed at the boob tube, getting through a rare Douglas Sirk or Roy William Neill film, or “Alligator People,” or even some freakish stretches of quality such as Bondarchuk’s “War and Peace,” through the incessant interruptions of commercial blocks.

The bulky boxes of tapespool littered our weekend floors for decades, as we chucked them into the maw of the machine, which ground and gnawed at the boxes, straining to turn its gears and play that precious tape. (We had, and still have, a TOP-LOADER! Good times!) The revolution was us.

The VCR released us from time and space, and gave us ownership. We eagerly caught up with films we WANTED to see, WHEN we wanted to see them. We could now set timers and tape TV shows too, free our viewing schedule from the intentions and ends of the programmers. The power of the movie theaters faced its second serious challenge at this time, after the introduction of broadcast television and anti-monopoly action brought down the big studios after World War II.

All the films we’d read about that we’d never seen rained into our lives. It was now possible for the average person to self-educate about the length and breadth of cinema.

The primary downsides of the VCR were the laughably difficult programming problems the recording system always seemed to have, the clanky, cranky laboring of the devices, and the grainy, stretched, and stuttering quality of the image itself. (Anyone on the production side from the period will tell you about the hellish nightmare that was editing videotape.)

 As a legacy medium, the VHS tape still has cachet. Yale picked up 2,700 of them last year, mostly horror films. Stephanie Rogers’ story for the Yale News points out that the VHS and VCR spurred the rise of low-budget cinema, particularly in the cost-effective horror genre, and direct-to-rental market helps to undermine cinema-going. (Pornography was, as always, on the cutting edge of whatever technological development came along, and thrived as well.)

The DVD murdered the VHS tape. Its infinitely better image, searchability, and capacity made it the winner over the tape. DVDs gave every film freak far more than even they could digest in one sitting. The advent of multiple data channels on each disc gave birth to the commentary track, scads of now-expected “extras,” alternative edits, contextualizing content, gag and blooper reels, and films within films. (The damn things do scratch easily.)

Now what’s next? A few years ago, Oliver Stone held up a DVD and said, “You may be the last generation to own a movie.” The video (now DVD) rental stores are almost extinct themselves. Even the Redbox movie-dispensing kiosk service, which killed the Blockbuster video-rental chain, finds itself becoming a less profitable anachronism. Its DVD rentals were down a whopping 17 percent in the fourth quarter of 2015.

Now that we are streaming film, we are purchasing temporary access to a product that’s not material. Pay for play. Downloads are possible, but we’ve come to find that digital files are just as prone to disruption, damage, overwriting, and loss as all those playlists you made on GrooveShark.

And that’s disturbing. I have about 2,000 films on DVD, very consciously chosen to provide me with an index of great films (OK, and “The Attack of the Killer Tomatoes” and “Pootie Tang”) for reference and repeated viewings. I am hoping the kids get into them and are accidentally infected with the rewards of quality viewing. How long until I have to jury-rig some kind of playback system for this collection I have no desire to rebuild again, from scratch? We all seem to end up living primarily in the last medium we are comfortable with, the one we commit to financially and emotionally.

That being said, I am still hoarding the following, as hope springs eternal – 78 rpm records, 45s, and standard vinyl; first-generation audiotape, cassettes, V-discs, CDs, DVDs, and . . . somewhere on this dusty shelf I’m probing . . . my last VHS tapes.

There are 15 tapes here I deemed indispensable a decade ago. I wonder what’s on them? Can I see the content on them some other way?

Here’s a head cleaner. “A Rugrats Chanukah,” “A Rugrats Passover,” both available via Hulu. My friends Kathy and Robin Beck’s hilarious documentary, “Grandpa’s Still in the TUFF Shed.” Keeper. Three vintage Daffy Duck cartoon compilations, one of Bugs Bunny, one merely labeled “classic.” (You can see where my priorities lie.) Keep.

Of course, I have to hang on to the Mary Martin “Peter Pan” TV production. Priceless!

Homemade mixes: here’s a John Ford triple feature, “The Lost Patrol,” “The Informer,” and “Wagon Master.” All easily found via streaming.

Here are two I can’t find anywhere else: Jack Gold’s brilliant and underrated retelling of “Robin Crusoe,” 1975’s “Man Friday,” with Peter O’Toole and Richard Roundtree. And the PBS mini-series version of Joseph Conrad’s “Nostromo” from 1996. “Nostromo” was the last, great, unrealized project of David Lean’s, and this production lacks something vital but points the way toward a truly definitive adaptation of the novel.

The first and last “Star Trek: The Next Generation” episodes. Of course. Keep.

Another compilation: the documentary on Russell Scott, Denver’s TV clown Blinky (can stream it); “The Adventures of Robin Hood” (likewise) and “The Maltese Falcon” (I have the DVD). Goodbye!

A documentary on my hero, Steinbeck; a miscellany of Laurel and Hardy shorts, some vintage Dana Gould (a criminally under-regarded standup comedian and writer), and some of those delectable vintage Fleischer Brothers Superman cartoons. Keeper.

And the family home videos. Our father’s side of the family was ravenously to new technology, and the earliest home-movie footage we have dates back to the mid-1930s. Our dauntless cousin Elaine picked up dozens of these Super 8 and 8mm home-movie shorts and had them transferred to videotape. (A dissection of moving family images from before my father’s birth to my youngest sister’s babyhood deserves another essay, and some therapy.) There are hours there to be pored over by curious descendants, discussed, laughed at, explained, and used as a springboard of associations. “That’s Aunt Emma,” I say, and her clean, damp, kitchen-y smell, her scrollwork piano, a laundry chute, the cuckoo clock, the steeply raked back yard, all manifest themselves, instantly.

The VHS tape in this last case will serve as a link to a new technology, duped to DVD and then undoubtedly to whatever new forms of recording and transmission evolve. But it’s a fact of physics that there is loss of signal, a weakening of the resolution of the image, each time a duplication to another medium is made. Will these irreplaceable ghosts of me, my parents, grandparents, sisters, cousins, and friends fade away down the years like pen strokes on a palimpsest, until finally forgotten and lost? When a medium dies, that erosion, that slippage occurs, and I worry.