Rant-Man's Notebook

By Jim "Rant-Man" MacQuarrie

A Rilly Big Shew

So last week I was talking about funny songs, and this week it paid off. But I'll get to that later. One of the things I touched on briefly is my favorite kind of funny music, the funny performance. What I mean by that is when somebody takes a "normal" song and performs it in a way that's funny. I like Weird Al and his predecessors (Allen Sherman, Tom Lehrer, et al), but the real masterpieces are the ones where the magic is in the performance. An example by the aforementioned would be Weird Al's arrangement of current rock songs into polkas. That kind of stuff kills me. I love that you can sing "Amazing Grace" to the tune of "Gilligan's Island." Try it, I'll wait. Fun, isn't it?

Now, goofy performances come in two flavors; the intentional and the unintentional. William Shatner's The Transformed Man is hysterical precisely because he was dead-serious when he recorded it; his near-psychotic reading of "Mister Tambourine Man" is milk-out-the-nose funny because he really thought it was ART. The intentionally funny is a little trickier; two good examples of that would be "Big Daddy" (on the Rhino label), a rock band that plays current songs in '50s style, and "The Templeton Twins," a duo from the late '70s that sang current songs in 1930s crooner style. Maybe I'm weird, but that stuff kills me. I know a guy who plays Mozart on a garden hose, and I think it's a riot.

I keep my clock-radio tuned to KRTH, the Oldies station. That's K-Earth, 101.1 on your FM dial in Los Angeles. The reason I picked that station is that it forces me to get up; they tend to play a lot of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, and there's nothing like a shrieking castrato to make you get up and turn the damn thing off. As it happens, they have a promotion going called "Make it Stop!"

The way it works is, they play a really bad cover version of a popular rock classic, and the first caller to correctly identify the performer wins a prize for Making it Stop. This week the prize is a DVD collection of the Ed Sullivan Show. Nine discs, featuring twelve dozen career-defining performances.

Tangent: For those of you who are not a part of the Fogey set, Ed Sullivan was the host of a variety show on CBS for about 20-odd years. He had everything on his show from barbershop quartets to the Doors, from the Beatles to dancing bears. He was also a total stiff, possibly the most wooden performer ever to appear on his own show. For some reason, this odd guy, with his continually-befuddled expression, was the hottest show on TV for two decades. Go figure. He had a bizarre way of talking, dragging out some words, taking strange pauses, mispronouncing words, the guy was a trip. Every Sunday night was a Really Big Show, which he pronounced "a rilly big shew." Sullivan made weird choices in the arrangement of his acts; for one Christmas show in the late 1960s, he had the Marine Glee Club perform "Silent Night." Then Ed came out and said, "that was the Marine Corps Glee Club. Tomorrow, those boys are shipping out to Viet Nam, and some of them may not be coming back. And now, the comedy stylings of Joan Rivers...." Most of the acts were fairly weird, too. You gotta see this thing. End Tangent.

So anyway, I'm listening to the radio, and it's time for "Make it Stop," and they start the record. There's a lone violin playing, and then a cultured english baritone begins reciting the lyrics to Bob Dylan's "It Ain't Me, Babe." Of course I recognize it immediately. I reach for the phone. As I'm dialing, people ahead of me are guessing: "Claude Akins?" "Ricardo Montalban?" "is it John Houseman?" I'm smirking to myself. Finally the phone rings and a guy says "K-Earth."

It's Sebastian Cabot," sez I.

(Yeah, Sebastian Cabot, the guy who played Mr. French on Family Affair, the narrator in the Winnie the Pooh cartoons and voice of Bagheera in The Jungle Book, recorded an entire album of Dylan songs. It's a wonderful thing.)

He puts me on hold and a moment later I'm on the air. The DJ asks me who I think it is, I tell him. I win! Woo Hoo.

The DJ asks me how I knew who it was. I say "That's a beautiful album."

"Beautiful. You're a sick man, Jim."

I wonder what he would have said if he'd known what I was thinking. While he was describing the Ed Sullivan collection, all I had in mind was "Oh lord, I hope it has that clip of George Hamilton in his Nehru jacket singing Sitting on the Dock of the Bay!"

Sick indeed. But this time, it paid off.

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