When Your Lawyer Screws You...You Know Who To Call
Monday, August 31, 2009
Monday, December 26, 2005
WNEW, WQEW, RIP
WNEW, WQEW, R.I.P
From 1999, I think.
______________________________________________
THE SONG WAS YOU
Help, there’s a hole in my radio.
This morning, while driving my sons to their respective playdates, I instinctively pushed preset three and waited for the voice of Sinatra to fill the van. Fooled again! For the ninth or tenth time in the past few weeks, the sounds of the Disney Radio Channel—obnoxious announcers, bubblegum tunes, smart-bomb commercials (they’ll only kill your kids)---woke me from my self-deception. WQEW was gone, and with it Sinatra Saturday, the latest victims of demographics and Disneyfication. For me, it was as if Ol’ Blue Eyes died twice in one year.
I’m a Disney shareholder myself, have been for a long time, and I’m going to continue to be one. Michael Eisner, notwithstanding his lukewarm ’98 season, is one of a handful of CEOs I’m comfortable entrusting with my risk capital. I’ve been making money for years off the schmaltzy culture he’s so good at manufacturing, and I don’t intend to stop now just because Mickey’s invading my backyard. (I know, evil triumphs when good men do nothing, but let’s not get carried away with ourselves here—we’re talking about disappointment, not tragedy.)
WQEW (and its predecessor, WNEW) was, as it never tired of telling you, the “home of American popular song”. Not the “pop” that runs up and down the Billboard charts today, but the songs we call “standards”—the incredible catalog created by maybe a hundred men (and a few women), largely between 1920 and 1960, for Broadway, Hollywood, and Tin Pan Alley. It is a body of work which provided the raw material for thousands of vocal recordings and countless jazz interpretations and which found its highest expression in the performances of Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday, Tony Bennett, Nat Cole and Ella Fitzgerald. The authors of these songs were brilliant, meticulous artisans who cared how words scanned, and who knew whether they rhymed or whether they only came close—who could paint the whole spectrum of emotion and humanity with notes and chords, rarely falling back on the musical cliché--who could tell a story and make you care deeply about that story and its characters in the time it takes to boil an egg, and who did so within a framework of rules that most of today’s practitioners would find difficult and confining, both musically and lyrically. But these were writers who refused to sacrifice craft on the altar of expression; they proudly served both masters and thereby didn’t just produce entertainments, but invented an art form. The quality of their work is remarkable especially in view of its enormous quantity; considered in its totality their output is, arguably, the high watermark of American popular culture.
And 1560 on the AM dial was where they lived in New York. There are great jazz stations that serve up much of the same material (mostly as instrumentals), but on QEW it wasn’t just the music that mattered---the song itself was king. Sure, you were listening to Clooney or Sarah Vaughan or Jo Stafford or Joe Williams (or, of course, Sinatra), but they were merely delivering the message. The station belonged to Arlen, Berlin, Porter, Mercer, Loesser, Lane, Lerner, Loewe, Rodgers, Hart, Mancini, Mandel, Coleman, the Bergmans, Shire, Maltby, LeGrand, Burke, Van Heusen, Parrish, Schwartz, Dietz, Kern, Fields, Hammerstein, Carmichael, Leigh, Sondheim,Youmans, Ellington, Warren, McHugh, and the Gershwins. (Not a small part of Sinatra’s genius, of course, was his ability to pick material.)
QEW, unfortunately, wrestled with its own demographic demons, and spent much of the average broadcast day pinned to the mat. Mid-century pop kitsch (and why pick on anyone here?) can be ear candy in small doses, but many a WQEW afternoon was the musical equivalent of Trick-Or-Treat --you pay the price later. (The sucking sound you heard in the fifties was Elvis filling the vacuum left by this stuff.)
When QEW was bad, though, it was just bad, but when it was good it was terrific, even sublime. Self-absorption aside, program host Jonathan Schwartz (his style was once described to me as “All Jonathan, All The Time”) is an exceptionally intelligent critic, a compellingly listenable raconteur, and a walking encyclopedia of the songs and their creators. You didn’t have to like him; if you cared about the songs, you listened to him anyway. His voice and demeanor suggested an aging prep school wiseguy fighting off laryngitis, but he cultivated an intimacy with his audience that enabled him to enter the microphone at his end and emerge from your radio at the other, Captain Kirk-like, plopping himself onto your car’s back seat or the recliner in your living room and holding forth. He invested “Sinatra Saturday” with an authority that made his arrogance not only tolerable, but necessary--he knew more than you did, much more. On his rambling Sunday morning show he often told the same story more than once, treating the names of the celebrated as Hansel did breadcrumbs, but you stayed with it to the end even after the umpteenth telling. These were stories, by and large, about the people who created the great songs and great recordings. One of my favorites is of the lyricist Howard Dietz who, upon being asked how quickly he could write, tossed off in a flash this parody of “Jealousy”:
Cyd Charisse
Get down off that mantelpiece
You’re quite a shock there
I think we need a clock there
I think that’s right, but I’m not sure—I only heard it twice.
Schwartz could be sanctimonious and overbearing, but he knew his stuff. And if he dropped a lot of names, so what? He had not only met most of those people (they hung out in his living room when he was growing up, the son of composer Arthur Schwartz), he loved them, and he loved their songs as much as we did. You could hear it.
And you could hear the love of the songs in morning man Bob Jones’ voice when, after playing a cut, he’d repeat a line from the lyric (“ ‘Hide your heart from sight, lock your dreams at night, it could happen to you’ ”, Jones might opine after listening with you to Jo Stafford’s take on Burke and Van Heusen, a discreetly seductive lilt creeping in on “could”.) And you could hear it when Stan Martin interviewed Julie Wilson or Mary Cleere Haran. Or when Les Davis said just about anything. In the old days (the 70s and 80s), you could hear it in Bob Haymes and Ted Brown and Jim Lowe and Jazzbeaux Collins and William B., and in the really old days you could hear it, as my mother did, in Martin Block.
And now they’re gone, having failed to pull off another death-defying jump to a different frequency (they landed at 1560 in 1992 after WNEW-AM 1130 was acquired by Bloomberg, another really smart Mike that I’d put my money with). So now a small but dedicated group of enthusiasts for a sound and a feeling that’s totally out of step with America at the millennium no longer has a place to turn when they sit in front of a radio. A new NPR station, anyone? Count me out. I don’t want to quench my thirst for elegance and refinement at the public trough. A Disney boycott? Not, I repeat, for my money. In the great scheme of things, this is really a tiny matter, surely smaller than Kosovo or teenage drug-use or Y2K or even the conversion of a Civil War battlefield into a theme park. Business is business, and art is art. When the twain meet it’s beautiful, but it doesn’t happen often and we shouldn’t come to expect it. In the end we get the face and the culture we deserve. So don’t blame a rich guy named Mike, even if next week a newly retired basketball icon acquires your favorite station and changes it to an all-hoop format. If you love the songs, buy the records and listen. Over and over.
From 1999, I think.
______________________________________________
THE SONG WAS YOU
Help, there’s a hole in my radio.
This morning, while driving my sons to their respective playdates, I instinctively pushed preset three and waited for the voice of Sinatra to fill the van. Fooled again! For the ninth or tenth time in the past few weeks, the sounds of the Disney Radio Channel—obnoxious announcers, bubblegum tunes, smart-bomb commercials (they’ll only kill your kids)---woke me from my self-deception. WQEW was gone, and with it Sinatra Saturday, the latest victims of demographics and Disneyfication. For me, it was as if Ol’ Blue Eyes died twice in one year.
I’m a Disney shareholder myself, have been for a long time, and I’m going to continue to be one. Michael Eisner, notwithstanding his lukewarm ’98 season, is one of a handful of CEOs I’m comfortable entrusting with my risk capital. I’ve been making money for years off the schmaltzy culture he’s so good at manufacturing, and I don’t intend to stop now just because Mickey’s invading my backyard. (I know, evil triumphs when good men do nothing, but let’s not get carried away with ourselves here—we’re talking about disappointment, not tragedy.)
WQEW (and its predecessor, WNEW) was, as it never tired of telling you, the “home of American popular song”. Not the “pop” that runs up and down the Billboard charts today, but the songs we call “standards”—the incredible catalog created by maybe a hundred men (and a few women), largely between 1920 and 1960, for Broadway, Hollywood, and Tin Pan Alley. It is a body of work which provided the raw material for thousands of vocal recordings and countless jazz interpretations and which found its highest expression in the performances of Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday, Tony Bennett, Nat Cole and Ella Fitzgerald. The authors of these songs were brilliant, meticulous artisans who cared how words scanned, and who knew whether they rhymed or whether they only came close—who could paint the whole spectrum of emotion and humanity with notes and chords, rarely falling back on the musical cliché--who could tell a story and make you care deeply about that story and its characters in the time it takes to boil an egg, and who did so within a framework of rules that most of today’s practitioners would find difficult and confining, both musically and lyrically. But these were writers who refused to sacrifice craft on the altar of expression; they proudly served both masters and thereby didn’t just produce entertainments, but invented an art form. The quality of their work is remarkable especially in view of its enormous quantity; considered in its totality their output is, arguably, the high watermark of American popular culture.
And 1560 on the AM dial was where they lived in New York. There are great jazz stations that serve up much of the same material (mostly as instrumentals), but on QEW it wasn’t just the music that mattered---the song itself was king. Sure, you were listening to Clooney or Sarah Vaughan or Jo Stafford or Joe Williams (or, of course, Sinatra), but they were merely delivering the message. The station belonged to Arlen, Berlin, Porter, Mercer, Loesser, Lane, Lerner, Loewe, Rodgers, Hart, Mancini, Mandel, Coleman, the Bergmans, Shire, Maltby, LeGrand, Burke, Van Heusen, Parrish, Schwartz, Dietz, Kern, Fields, Hammerstein, Carmichael, Leigh, Sondheim,Youmans, Ellington, Warren, McHugh, and the Gershwins. (Not a small part of Sinatra’s genius, of course, was his ability to pick material.)
QEW, unfortunately, wrestled with its own demographic demons, and spent much of the average broadcast day pinned to the mat. Mid-century pop kitsch (and why pick on anyone here?) can be ear candy in small doses, but many a WQEW afternoon was the musical equivalent of Trick-Or-Treat --you pay the price later. (The sucking sound you heard in the fifties was Elvis filling the vacuum left by this stuff.)
When QEW was bad, though, it was just bad, but when it was good it was terrific, even sublime. Self-absorption aside, program host Jonathan Schwartz (his style was once described to me as “All Jonathan, All The Time”) is an exceptionally intelligent critic, a compellingly listenable raconteur, and a walking encyclopedia of the songs and their creators. You didn’t have to like him; if you cared about the songs, you listened to him anyway. His voice and demeanor suggested an aging prep school wiseguy fighting off laryngitis, but he cultivated an intimacy with his audience that enabled him to enter the microphone at his end and emerge from your radio at the other, Captain Kirk-like, plopping himself onto your car’s back seat or the recliner in your living room and holding forth. He invested “Sinatra Saturday” with an authority that made his arrogance not only tolerable, but necessary--he knew more than you did, much more. On his rambling Sunday morning show he often told the same story more than once, treating the names of the celebrated as Hansel did breadcrumbs, but you stayed with it to the end even after the umpteenth telling. These were stories, by and large, about the people who created the great songs and great recordings. One of my favorites is of the lyricist Howard Dietz who, upon being asked how quickly he could write, tossed off in a flash this parody of “Jealousy”:
Cyd Charisse
Get down off that mantelpiece
You’re quite a shock there
I think we need a clock there
I think that’s right, but I’m not sure—I only heard it twice.
Schwartz could be sanctimonious and overbearing, but he knew his stuff. And if he dropped a lot of names, so what? He had not only met most of those people (they hung out in his living room when he was growing up, the son of composer Arthur Schwartz), he loved them, and he loved their songs as much as we did. You could hear it.
And you could hear the love of the songs in morning man Bob Jones’ voice when, after playing a cut, he’d repeat a line from the lyric (“ ‘Hide your heart from sight, lock your dreams at night, it could happen to you’ ”, Jones might opine after listening with you to Jo Stafford’s take on Burke and Van Heusen, a discreetly seductive lilt creeping in on “could”.) And you could hear it when Stan Martin interviewed Julie Wilson or Mary Cleere Haran. Or when Les Davis said just about anything. In the old days (the 70s and 80s), you could hear it in Bob Haymes and Ted Brown and Jim Lowe and Jazzbeaux Collins and William B., and in the really old days you could hear it, as my mother did, in Martin Block.
And now they’re gone, having failed to pull off another death-defying jump to a different frequency (they landed at 1560 in 1992 after WNEW-AM 1130 was acquired by Bloomberg, another really smart Mike that I’d put my money with). So now a small but dedicated group of enthusiasts for a sound and a feeling that’s totally out of step with America at the millennium no longer has a place to turn when they sit in front of a radio. A new NPR station, anyone? Count me out. I don’t want to quench my thirst for elegance and refinement at the public trough. A Disney boycott? Not, I repeat, for my money. In the great scheme of things, this is really a tiny matter, surely smaller than Kosovo or teenage drug-use or Y2K or even the conversion of a Civil War battlefield into a theme park. Business is business, and art is art. When the twain meet it’s beautiful, but it doesn’t happen often and we shouldn’t come to expect it. In the end we get the face and the culture we deserve. So don’t blame a rich guy named Mike, even if next week a newly retired basketball icon acquires your favorite station and changes it to an all-hoop format. If you love the songs, buy the records and listen. Over and over.
Stupidest Lyrics Ever
1. Yellow Submarine
"And our friends are all aboard
Many more of them live next door"
Listen, if your friends are all aboard, then you can't have any other friends who live next door. Period.
2. What's Goin' On
"Tell me what's goin' on, and I'll tell you what's goin' on"
A great Marvin recording, but if you tell me what's goin' on, why would I bother telling you what's goin' on? You'd already know, right? That's why you were able to tell me in the first place.
3. Piano Man
"Son can you play me a memory, I'm not really sure how it goes
But it's sad and it's sweet and I knew it complete
When I wore a younger man's clothes"
OK, pal, that should be enough to go on. Seriously....HOW THE FUCK is the piano player supposed to know what song this drunken cocksucker is talking about? And what about the line "I knew it complete"? COMPLETE?
Other question: What was the "younger man" wearing when the creepy old drunk was wearing the younger man's clothes?
4. I Am, I Said
Yep, no-one heard at all, not even the chair. Wow---you're thinking, "How do you top that?" But I'm inclined to give Neil a pass on that bit of stupidity, and not just because he's already been nailed dozens of times for it, but also because, technically, he's right: the chair didn't hear him. Any argument?
But wait---Neil isn't finished just yet:
Did you ever read about a frog who dreamed of being a king
And then became one
Well, except for the names and a few other changes
If you talk about me, the story's the same one
Except for the names and a few other changes? A few other changes? A few???? Like just a couple of smallish details, right, Neil? No big deal, some minor stuff. Like, uh, that the frog is a palm-sized amphibian and you're a jewish kid from Brooklyn. That's all, right?
Oh, and the frog has a fucking name????? Sure.
5. Everything I Own
This is hard for me to do, because David Gates intended this sweet song as a tribute to his Dad. But when you sing:
" I would give everything I own
Give up my life, my heart, my home
I would give everything I own
Just to have you back again"
then I'm sorry, you're fair game. How, if you give up your life, could you have ANYTHING back again? And how big a sacrifice is your home once you give up your life?
6. Midnight Train To Georgia
Check the Amtrak schedules. I did. There isn't any such train; in fact, there is no way to get by rail from LA to Atlanta except by going through somewhere else.
7. California Dreaming
In the third chorus, we hear this line:
"If I didn't tell her, I could leave today."
Her? Who the fuck is "her"? What is the singer talking about? Go back and listen to the first two choruses, and see if you can find a reference to "her". And what did he tell "her" that made it impossible for him to leave today?
8. The Most Beautiful Girl In The World
"It's goodbye care
When my slippers are next to the ones that belong
To the one and only beautiful girl in the world."
Writers of standards from the Golden Age don't get a pass, and just because you wrote more than a few great ones doesn't mean you're not capable of throwing out a real clunker every now and then. And Dick Rodgers' little buddy Larry Hart threw out more than his share of clunkers, so don't get me started, but this one takes the cake. I mean, not to get too Wittgensteinian, but if she's the "one and only beautiful girl in the world" can she also be the "most beautiful girl in the world"? In fact, she couldn't even be "the more beautiful girl in the world". I wouldn't let a rock-era writer get away with that kind of laziness, and Hart shouldn't be able to get away with it either.
9. My Old Flame
Another Tin Pan Alley standard, I'm afraid, and a beautiful tune ruined by an insipid lyric. Co-written by Sam Coslow and Arthur Johnston in the thirties, the song begins:
"My old flame
I can't even think of his name
But it's funny now and then
How my thoughts go flashing back again
To my old flame"
OK, she can't even think of his name, and her thoughts go flashing back to him only "now and then". The kind of stuff we all think about after a drink or two, and then we move on. But not this broad, who mid-way through her melodic reverie has begun to remind us of Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction. Talk about obsessive---by the end of the song, a mere three minutes from when she barely remembered him, finding this forgettable guy has become her life's work. Makes you want to hide your rabbit while there's still time. Anyhow, too bad for her they didn't have Google in 1934.
"My old flame
I can't even think of his name
But I’ll never be the same
Until I discover what became
Of my old flame"
Sorry, I don't buy it.
"And our friends are all aboard
Many more of them live next door"
Listen, if your friends are all aboard, then you can't have any other friends who live next door. Period.
2. What's Goin' On
"Tell me what's goin' on, and I'll tell you what's goin' on"
A great Marvin recording, but if you tell me what's goin' on, why would I bother telling you what's goin' on? You'd already know, right? That's why you were able to tell me in the first place.
3. Piano Man
"Son can you play me a memory, I'm not really sure how it goes
But it's sad and it's sweet and I knew it complete
When I wore a younger man's clothes"
OK, pal, that should be enough to go on. Seriously....HOW THE FUCK is the piano player supposed to know what song this drunken cocksucker is talking about? And what about the line "I knew it complete"? COMPLETE?
Other question: What was the "younger man" wearing when the creepy old drunk was wearing the younger man's clothes?
4. I Am, I Said
Yep, no-one heard at all, not even the chair. Wow---you're thinking, "How do you top that?" But I'm inclined to give Neil a pass on that bit of stupidity, and not just because he's already been nailed dozens of times for it, but also because, technically, he's right: the chair didn't hear him. Any argument?
But wait---Neil isn't finished just yet:
Did you ever read about a frog who dreamed of being a king
And then became one
Well, except for the names and a few other changes
If you talk about me, the story's the same one
Except for the names and a few other changes? A few other changes? A few???? Like just a couple of smallish details, right, Neil? No big deal, some minor stuff. Like, uh, that the frog is a palm-sized amphibian and you're a jewish kid from Brooklyn. That's all, right?
Oh, and the frog has a fucking name????? Sure.
5. Everything I Own
This is hard for me to do, because David Gates intended this sweet song as a tribute to his Dad. But when you sing:
" I would give everything I own
Give up my life, my heart, my home
I would give everything I own
Just to have you back again"
then I'm sorry, you're fair game. How, if you give up your life, could you have ANYTHING back again? And how big a sacrifice is your home once you give up your life?
6. Midnight Train To Georgia
Check the Amtrak schedules. I did. There isn't any such train; in fact, there is no way to get by rail from LA to Atlanta except by going through somewhere else.
7. California Dreaming
In the third chorus, we hear this line:
"If I didn't tell her, I could leave today."
Her? Who the fuck is "her"? What is the singer talking about? Go back and listen to the first two choruses, and see if you can find a reference to "her". And what did he tell "her" that made it impossible for him to leave today?
8. The Most Beautiful Girl In The World
"It's goodbye care
When my slippers are next to the ones that belong
To the one and only beautiful girl in the world."
Writers of standards from the Golden Age don't get a pass, and just because you wrote more than a few great ones doesn't mean you're not capable of throwing out a real clunker every now and then. And Dick Rodgers' little buddy Larry Hart threw out more than his share of clunkers, so don't get me started, but this one takes the cake. I mean, not to get too Wittgensteinian, but if she's the "one and only beautiful girl in the world" can she also be the "most beautiful girl in the world"? In fact, she couldn't even be "the more beautiful girl in the world". I wouldn't let a rock-era writer get away with that kind of laziness, and Hart shouldn't be able to get away with it either.
9. My Old Flame
Another Tin Pan Alley standard, I'm afraid, and a beautiful tune ruined by an insipid lyric. Co-written by Sam Coslow and Arthur Johnston in the thirties, the song begins:
"My old flame
I can't even think of his name
But it's funny now and then
How my thoughts go flashing back again
To my old flame"
OK, she can't even think of his name, and her thoughts go flashing back to him only "now and then". The kind of stuff we all think about after a drink or two, and then we move on. But not this broad, who mid-way through her melodic reverie has begun to remind us of Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction. Talk about obsessive---by the end of the song, a mere three minutes from when she barely remembered him, finding this forgettable guy has become her life's work. Makes you want to hide your rabbit while there's still time. Anyhow, too bad for her they didn't have Google in 1934.
"My old flame
I can't even think of his name
But I’ll never be the same
Until I discover what became
Of my old flame"
Sorry, I don't buy it.
Cy Coleman, RIP
Cy Coleman, RIP
Just about the last of the great Broadway tunesmiths has left us. John Kander is still around, as are Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock, but over the past couple of decades we've witnessed the passing of Richard Rodgers, Harold Arlen, Arthur Schwartz, Ira Gershwin, Fred Ebb, Adolph
Green, Leonard Bernstein, Jimmy van Heusen, Irving Berlin, and dozens of other great craftsmen of song. Truly the end of an era is unfolding. These guys wrote songs for others to sing, and they were exacting in their execution, harshly self-critical to the point ofneurotic perfectionism.
The singer-songwriters who emerged in the sixties ( beginning with Dylan and The Beatles) were entertainers first who understood not only that they wanted to tell their own stories, but who also grasped the compelling economics of owning and controlling your own publishing
catalog. As performers, it was all too easy for them to make do with less than perfect rhyming, meter, and scanning. If you could squeeze another word into a chorus and it helped to get your point across, why not do it? And while sophisticated harmonies might not have been
beyond their musical reach--the later Beatles (and the early Doors!) produced some significant music that you have to listen to more than once to really hear---there is a 1-4-5 sameness that pervades a great deal of folk and rock 'n roll. The production values in the studio and
on the tour stage often counted for as much as the basic material. That's why he's Sir George Martin.
The Broadway guys were different. If a lyric didn't fit a melody, they went back to the drawing board (Oscar Hammerstein lamented for the rest of his life settling for the word "divine" in the penultimate phrase of "All The Things You Are", and it is jarring, but he only had two syllables to work with and Jerome Kern was quite happy with the melody exactly the way he'd written it, thank you). The Broadway composers often provided harmonies that surprised the audiences of
their day, and many of their tunes sound just as fresh today as theydid when they were composed. They wrote songs that, by and large, were meant for delivery by a lone performer with a single accompanying piano. Try doing that with "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" or "Get Off Of My Cloud". (No flames, please; I've got big ears and a very large Stones and Beatles collection).
Sinatra's greatness is only partially explained by his rich baritone, flawless phrasing, and unequalled stage appeal. He also brought to the party an unmatched ear for the great song. Many of the tunes we know as "standards" today might have disappeared but for having been
hand-picked for eternal preservation by The Chairman. Cy Coleman gave him two of his greatest hits: "Witchcraft" and "The Best Is Yet To Come", neither of which was originally a show tune.
Coleman also composed the scores for Wildcat (including "Hey Look Me Over"),Sweet Charity ("Hey Big Spender" and "If My Friends Could See Me Now"). More recently, he wrote the songs for the 1990 hit show City Of Angels, which gets my vote as easily the best original Broadway
score of the past 20 years or so. And for the red states, Coleman wrote The Will Rogers Follies with lyricists Comden and Green. If you get a chance, listen to the musical setting he provides for "Never Met A Man I Didn't Like", an American anthem if I ever heard one, sappy lyrical flourishes and all.
The remaining great craftsmen (which group includes one of the greatest of them all, the still prolific Stephen Sondheim) can be counted on the fingers of one hand. They continue bravely to soldier on against the cultural onslaught of short attention spans, Andrew Lloyd Webber, musical illiteracy, and MTV. Cy Coleman will be sorely missed.
Just about the last of the great Broadway tunesmiths has left us. John Kander is still around, as are Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock, but over the past couple of decades we've witnessed the passing of Richard Rodgers, Harold Arlen, Arthur Schwartz, Ira Gershwin, Fred Ebb, Adolph
Green, Leonard Bernstein, Jimmy van Heusen, Irving Berlin, and dozens of other great craftsmen of song. Truly the end of an era is unfolding. These guys wrote songs for others to sing, and they were exacting in their execution, harshly self-critical to the point ofneurotic perfectionism.
The singer-songwriters who emerged in the sixties ( beginning with Dylan and The Beatles) were entertainers first who understood not only that they wanted to tell their own stories, but who also grasped the compelling economics of owning and controlling your own publishing
catalog. As performers, it was all too easy for them to make do with less than perfect rhyming, meter, and scanning. If you could squeeze another word into a chorus and it helped to get your point across, why not do it? And while sophisticated harmonies might not have been
beyond their musical reach--the later Beatles (and the early Doors!) produced some significant music that you have to listen to more than once to really hear---there is a 1-4-5 sameness that pervades a great deal of folk and rock 'n roll. The production values in the studio and
on the tour stage often counted for as much as the basic material. That's why he's Sir George Martin.
The Broadway guys were different. If a lyric didn't fit a melody, they went back to the drawing board (Oscar Hammerstein lamented for the rest of his life settling for the word "divine" in the penultimate phrase of "All The Things You Are", and it is jarring, but he only had two syllables to work with and Jerome Kern was quite happy with the melody exactly the way he'd written it, thank you). The Broadway composers often provided harmonies that surprised the audiences of
their day, and many of their tunes sound just as fresh today as theydid when they were composed. They wrote songs that, by and large, were meant for delivery by a lone performer with a single accompanying piano. Try doing that with "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" or "Get Off Of My Cloud". (No flames, please; I've got big ears and a very large Stones and Beatles collection).
Sinatra's greatness is only partially explained by his rich baritone, flawless phrasing, and unequalled stage appeal. He also brought to the party an unmatched ear for the great song. Many of the tunes we know as "standards" today might have disappeared but for having been
hand-picked for eternal preservation by The Chairman. Cy Coleman gave him two of his greatest hits: "Witchcraft" and "The Best Is Yet To Come", neither of which was originally a show tune.
Coleman also composed the scores for Wildcat (including "Hey Look Me Over"),Sweet Charity ("Hey Big Spender" and "If My Friends Could See Me Now"). More recently, he wrote the songs for the 1990 hit show City Of Angels, which gets my vote as easily the best original Broadway
score of the past 20 years or so. And for the red states, Coleman wrote The Will Rogers Follies with lyricists Comden and Green. If you get a chance, listen to the musical setting he provides for "Never Met A Man I Didn't Like", an American anthem if I ever heard one, sappy lyrical flourishes and all.
The remaining great craftsmen (which group includes one of the greatest of them all, the still prolific Stephen Sondheim) can be counted on the fingers of one hand. They continue bravely to soldier on against the cultural onslaught of short attention spans, Andrew Lloyd Webber, musical illiteracy, and MTV. Cy Coleman will be sorely missed.
Glorify!
An ecumenical gospel tune? Why not? Glorify! took third place, gospel category, in a songwriting contest I entered a few years ago. I think I still have the sunglasses they sent me as a prize.
Shelter Of Peace--Ufros Aleinu
This song is taken from a hebrew prayer. I composed the musical setting and some ancillary english lyrics in 1998, and I was lucky enough to get my cantor at the time, Neil Blumofe, to sing it.
(Full translation of the hebrew: Spread over us Your shelter of peace. Guide us with Your good counsel.)
(Full translation of the hebrew: Spread over us Your shelter of peace. Guide us with Your good counsel.)
All The Good Ones Are Taken
After I wrote this, I learned that Pam Tillis had a hit single called "All The Good Ones Are Gone". She was talking about men, I guess. I like my song better.
Wednesday, November 17, 2004
Eisner And Ovitz On The Roof
Eisner and Ovitz On The Roof
(to the tune of "To Life!")
To Mike
And Mike
Two Michaels
That's one Michael more than you need
With every thing that we knew of them
How could the two of them
Ever think they'd succeed?
This pair of Michaels
Like two spinning wheels on a bike
But if they're overinflated then
Blow-ups are fated when
They run over a spike
(bridge)
Every time they are together
Each Mike tells us "Mike is someone that I like"
Now we understand which Mike
Each Mike must have in mind
When Mike says "I like Mike!"
(chorus)
So Mike
It must be thrilling
To send every friend on a hike
First you told Jeff "Au Revoir,Ami,
Leave off your men's room key
Now you've done it....to Mike!!
(to the tune of "To Life!")
To Mike
And Mike
Two Michaels
That's one Michael more than you need
With every thing that we knew of them
How could the two of them
Ever think they'd succeed?
This pair of Michaels
Like two spinning wheels on a bike
But if they're overinflated then
Blow-ups are fated when
They run over a spike
(bridge)
Every time they are together
Each Mike tells us "Mike is someone that I like"
Now we understand which Mike
Each Mike must have in mind
When Mike says "I like Mike!"
(chorus)
So Mike
It must be thrilling
To send every friend on a hike
First you told Jeff "Au Revoir,Ami,
Leave off your men's room key
Now you've done it....to Mike!!
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